PRZ: ``is DES dead? ''

seen on info.pem-dev, headers deleted ===cut=here=== From: Philip Zimmermann To: ratinox@ccs.neu.edu Subject: Re: DES Key Search Paper (fwd) Michael Weiner presented a paper at Crypto93 that describes a fast DES key search engine that uses a special inside-out DES chip that he designed. This chip takes a single plaintext/ciphertext pair and quickly tries DES keys until it finds one that produces the given ciphertext from the given plaintext. Weiner can get these chips made for $10.50 each in quantity, and can build a special machine with 57000 of these chips for $1 million. This machine can exhaust the DES key space in 7 hours, finding a key in 3.5 hours on the average. He works for Bell Northern Research in Ottawa, and says they have not actually built this machine, but he has the chip fully designed and ready for fabrication. This is a stunning breakthrough in the realization of practical DES cracking. BTW-- note that PEM uses straight 56-bit DES. -prz Forwarded message:

From prz Wed Sep 1 14:11:48 1993 Message-Id: <9309012010.AA10083@columbine.cgd.ucar.EDU> Subject: Re: DES Key Search Paper To: wiener@bnr.ca (Michael) Date: Wed, 1 Sep 93 14:10:18 MDT From: Philip Zimmermann Cc: prz (Philip Zimmermann) In-Reply-To: <"15836 Wed Sep 1 12:14:00 1993"@bnr.ca>; from "Michael" at Aug 31, 93 11:32 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL0]

Thanks, Michael. Your paper was the most important paper presented at Crypto93, in my opinion. It drove a wooden stake thru DES's heart.

$1 million - 3.5 hours $10 miliion - 20 minutes $100 million - 2 minutes

It is not plausible to me that NSA's budget for examining DES-encrypted traffic is less than $100 million. Two minutes. Damn. Two fucking minutes. DES is dead, dead, dead.

Regards, Philip