OK, I sort of wanted to break up the constant flaming on this thread, so I thought I would introduce my own (admittedly ignorant) way to break DES. 1. Start with a full keysearch of all 2^56 possible DES keys. 2. If you have plaintext to work with, compare each sample decryption with the plaintext. 2a. If you don't have plaintext, I would try washing the decryptions through a pattern searching algorithm that would include a dictionary, patterns from compression programs like PKZip, machine language instructions, and any other possible form of communication that can be represented as a binary string. At least that's how I would do it. If anyone has any suggestions, corrections, etc. I wouldn't mind hearing them. Doug