re off the shelf cheap des keyseach machine was re corporate acceptance of the wiretap chip in article strnlghtc wcmo fx netcom com strnlght netcom com david sternlight writes in article c uvn mf austin ibm com arussell austin ibm com ag russell writes at the company i worked for previously i received a file that was des encryped and the person that had sent it went on vaction rather than wait two weeks i set up a straight frontal attack with one key at a time it only took two days to crack the file taking this at face value though it seems quite dissonant with much else that has been published here about brute force des cracking unless russell was lucky with respect to the key i d be very interested in whether the program russell used is available in whether he used a cleartext recognition algorithm in the program or whether he had to examine each decryption by hand in whether he used a known plaintext attack this has to be a dictionary attack no other attack makes sense this means that whoever encrypted the file just typed some password which was a single dictionary word and then russell tried all the words in the dictionary this isn t too implausible especially if he was smart and clipped the first plaintext block off the ciphertext if the first block doesn t decrypt then obviously the others won t either assuming one attempt a second it takes seven hours to try all the words in usr dict words not real tough if you want des to be secure you have to use random keys you can t just type your wife s name and think aha they ll never guess that one daniel f boyd boyd cs buffalo edu welcome to the first church of appliantology the white zone is for loading and unloading only
