Re: 40-bit RC5 crack meaningless??

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, Vin McLellan wrote:

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Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 20:10:36 -0500 To: "Wright Larry" From: "Paul A. Strassmann" Subject: Further to Goldberg's Cracking Accomplishments Gentlemen:

As I suspected (see earlier private comment), the highly promoted RSA cracking contest offered a number of clues that ordinarly would not be volunteered by info-terrorists or info-criminals to IW Defense teams.

These clues made the cracking significantly easier, because it made it possible to eliminate an enormous range of possible searches.

Hmm..., word size, number of rounds, and key size are "clues"? At least he won't be able to make this claim when DES is cracked. OTOH, he might consider a known IV to be information not available under "infowar conditions." Apparently, "Info Warriors" aren't supposed to be familiar with open standards.

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Clue #3: (a giveway!)

" ... For each contest, the unknown plaintext message is preceded by three known blocks of text that contain the 24-character phrase "The unknown message is: .....".

He considers a known-plaintext attack to be "a giveway![sic]"? It seems that this guy could use a few clues himself. Mark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBMvpmNCzIPc7jvyFpAQFr1wgAv9qRp1JEDe6qMLGcgs/4rJnPmUkSIDoM u769VJRO3XHYS+gIEu/A/f/jS9Mr7inqkaM/E5BhQeD2NuzSgI7IWENqvshlgeFF DrSdKqDkvwTNjaPeLvb3WoFMMSuvlVj78pYawDEFwEmhQkccE/h+I1obgCE3juk9 lw/Lto7qdA+nVnyQ0PuICbIV6lksbVTcfBG/UF5MD7HsnJzPUKReFuyPrWo6S5+4 kc1/yUjq5ABL79gNxEZmUTA6zdjwjj11x2vL1cvQP8t3PZ1K5V/bay2FlSrXvNF9 +h0GvYpPQ/0rd6whYcgCbls/5KB+GYxaCXPWvh8sFYZZBP0IFYBjiw== =ltSt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----