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 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 no i don t have any faith in des 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 key search is very practical in many real situations since people use such stupid keys on the average password crackers know this well depending on his answer this could be an appalling development calling into question both des and rsa des not really in fact public key based communication systems very often pick keys automatically which are much better than passwords or pass phrases if any bright programmer with a little idle machine time can crack a single des message in a couple of days assuming no tricks that are message specific if a person picked the password or pass phrase then the key search is pretty straightforward in running english text the average content of a single word is about bits in pass phrases this may increase to bits or so searching bit spaces is semi practical even in software and searching bit spaces isn t outrageous to imagine with hardware assists of moderate size
