The NYT article is way overblown; the attack is only against the particular mode in the standard and requires something like 2^64 texts. It's great work, but not a very practical attack. At 07:44 AM 3/31/98 -0500, John Young wrote:

NYT-Markoff reports today on Biham and Knudsen's paper on 3DES weakness, "Cryptanalysis of the ANSI X9.52 CBCM Mode," noted here a few days ago.

The ANSI X9.F1 committee has held up implementing its standard as a result, and may have to wait for AES. Credit is given to the worldwide DES crack.

http://www.nytimes.com

See a mirror:

http://jya.com/3des-weak.htm

Get the Biham/Knudsen paper:

http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/%7Ebiham/publications.html

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