From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com> If the story is true, it means that the NSA can break some classes of conventional cryptosystems very fast -- fast enough to be of use in this case, for instance.
It's also possible that they're not doing a direct cryptanalytic attack. They might be using technical or human means to compromise the key distribution, for example, or they might just have bugged somebody's phone. But, yeah, the bottom line is that they were able to read Russian military communications, which is a substantial achievement.
We are all very dependent on things like MD5 and IDEA, which may or may not actually be secure. We should bear this in mind.
The lack of decent theoretical underpinnings for most cryptosystems is rather worrisome. Eli ebrandt@hmc.edu