"That DES can be broken so quickly should send a chill through the heart of anyone relying on it for secure communications,"
I'm shitting bricks. No mention was made that only 25% of the keyspace was tested.
Not only that, but single DES with a 56 bit key is just not being used anymore in any company which has the slightest clue. If they can run a distributed crack on 3DES with independent subkeys then I`ll give them some attention. I`m not downgrading the effort, Joe "wired reader" Sixpack doesn`t know the difference between DES, 3DES and his ass anyway, so it is a significant publicity stunt that will get normal non-specialist people thinking about the export laws, and about how quickly DES can be broken by the government if it can be broken by a few guys on the internet in months. All I am saying is that looking at it from a purely scientific point of view it is not a great cryptanalytic achievement, merely a PR stunt.
Unfortunately some companies depend on BS to sell products. Glad to see C2Net is no different,
What did you expect? Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"