17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
stewarts@ix.netcom.com writes:
Hip Hip Hooray! Clinton will finally let us use _some_ 20+year-old encryption code, which has been known to be relatively weak for 15 years, as long as we give them all our keys! What a guy!
I personally don't mind forcing escrow of 56 bit keys so long as people can use 128 bit keys without escrow. >:-)
I assume he's partly doing this to make a big "See, I'm in favor of high-tech trade and crime-fighting" push in time for the election, and unlike RC4/40, cracking DES on general-purpose processors _is_ a big enough job that probably can't do a distributed crack in two weeks.
We really have to work on cracking DES at least once -- it would substantially reduce the wind in the Administration's sails. Perry