Federal Key Registration Agency
Perry E. Metzger
perry at piermont.com
Fri Jun 21 14:40:52 PDT 1996
Michael Froomkin writes:
> I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly,
> wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion
> that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a
> "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for
> known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext,
> what's a more reasonable assumption?
Known plaintext isn't needed for any brute force DES attack. Indeed,
our own Dave Wagner showed in a paper not that long ago how to
automate the process of detecting a good key.
The numbers in the Blaze et al paper are very realistic on this. A
year is total bull -- not even within several orders of magnitude of
accuracy.
Perry
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