Re: Triple DES products hitting market

Anonymous <nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> writes:

Cylink Triples Encryption by Sharon Fisher ... Cylink's Cipher/Decipher-HSi offers triple-DES, which encrypts DES data three times, and gives the 56-bit key the effect of a 112-bit key, according to the company, based here. The triple-DES approach makes the Cylink product more secure than the government's proposed Clipper system, which uses an 80-bit key, the company said.

Umm. How does this make a system much more resistant to an attack like Weiner's? If there's only a single 56-bit key, the brute-force known-plaintext + ciphertext attack still only needs to do < 2^56 trial encrypt/decrypt operations. Lyle Transarc 707 Grant Street 412 338 4474 The Gulf Tower Pittsburgh 15219