Peter Trei writes:
Since it looks like the US government will be allowing the export of 56 bit espionage-enabled software, it's time to kill single DES.
Yes. It's an obsolete cipher with a woefully small key. Only a catastrophic failure will cause the ABA to undergo religious enlightenment.
As some of you will recall, a while back I wondered aloud about the feasibility of brute-forcing DES on general purpose machines, ala the RC4-40 crack last year.
I'm a firm believer in "work smart, not hard." It might be interesting to run a wiring diagram of DES through a superoptimizer and see how many algebraic identities fall out. An analytical crack that could be published on the Net would be far more impressive than harnassing gigacycles on every available machine, which might very well awe the gullible into thinking DES was difficult to break.
On this type of processor, it would still take 9133 years to exhaust a 56 bit key space. On the other hand, on 20,000 processors of this power it would take less than 6 months. If the target is encrypted in a chaining mode with an unknown 8 byte IV, the time more than doubles.
I can see the headlines now. "Cypherpunks show DES can withstand up to 9,000 Pentium-years of torture and keep on ticking." Remember the Law of Unintended Consequences. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $