Re: Phil Zimmerman on 'The Death of DES'

Single DES is weak, for a known plaintext attack. I think we knew that. We didn't know how weak. We can extrapolate to an NSA machine with 1 second scan of all keys, perhaps. So -- 1. use triple DES 2. before using DES, XOR with a stream from a decent PRNG (destroying the known plaintext) 3. in between DES operations, mix bytes up as with tran (posted on sci.crypt occasionally, avbl from me by mail or on ripem.msu.edu) -- spreading bytes out within a huge block, further hiding any known text - Carl