Michael Froomkin writes:
I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, what's a more reasonable assumption?
Known plaintext isn't needed for any brute force DES attack. Indeed, our own Dave Wagner showed in a paper not that long ago how to automate the process of detecting a good key. The numbers in the Blaze et al paper are very realistic on this. A year is total bull -- not even within several orders of magnitude of accuracy. Perry