On Fri, 4 Oct 1996 06:16:44 -0700 (PDT), Lucky Green wrote:
1. Is this a good idea? What will happen if DES becomes perceived as insecure?
That's Declan's department (and other non-clueless journalists - declan is just the most visible). If it get's widespread and the target is something like Digicash, it'd get picked up by the Crime/Snoozeweek crowd.
Sorry, not a chance. The symmetric cipher used in Ecash is 3DES. Since DigiCash has the good fortune to be located in The Netherlands, full strength crypto can be (and is) used in all their products.
I guess that was kind of ambigous. What I meant was any protocal/system where money is changing hands protected only by DES. That's what I meant by "like digicash". I don't even know if such a beast exists, but was suggesting that anything involving weakly protected money would be a good target because it highlights the vulnerability and would get media attention. # Chris Adams <adamsc@io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams@acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)