Matsui-san Attack

]> A bigger problem is that PEM uses DES rather than IDEA. I just learned ]> of a new attack by Mitsuru Matsui of Mitsubishi that requires 2^43 ]> *known* plaintexts, not chosen ones. The note I received says that it ]> ``breaks the scheme in 50 days on 12 HP9735 workstations''. This was ]> presented last week at the Japanese Conference on Cryptography and ]> Information Security. 50 days on 12 HP9735 = 600 days on a single HP9735 The 735 has a pretty fast Mflop rating (compared to Sun, IBM, SGI, PC, and Macs). Using a comparable breaker on the average machine, it is going to take two years to "break the scheme". That leaves two years to create stronger/tighter strategies.