I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though - won't the US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able to say "It took 10,000 Pentiums several weeks, noone would bother doing that, so it's safe" (with a possible side order of "Safer-SK64 is 256 times as secure, anyone we really like can use that provided they hand over the keys in advance").

I'm nervous too, but consider "for only a $10k reward, look at the effort people went through. People are using DES to protect things *much* more valuable than $10k."

Peter.

-- Sameer Parekh Voice: 510-986-8770 President FAX: 510-986-8777 C2Net C2Net is having a party: http://www.c2.net/party/ http://www.c2.net/ sameer@c2.net

Dan Geer writes:

I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though - won't the US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able to say "It took 10,000 Pentiums several weeks, noone would bother doing that, so it's safe"...

this seems a good moment to remind ourselves that we will never know as much about another cipher as we know about DES.

ipso facto, i'd like to simply use the efficiency of price discovery by auction and see what I can buy the DES-key-of-your-choice for. my bet: there are a lot of interesting DES keys available for less than $10K

This is an excellent idea. Do the rules of RSA's challenge allow for bribing the holder of the contest keys? What a headline -- "DES Challenge Broken In 15 Minutes" Then there's the rubber hose method.... Patrick May (who does not advocate the initiation of force for a mere $10k)