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This chip takes a single plaintext/ciphertext pair and quickly tries DES keys until it finds one that produces the given ciphertext from the given plaintext.

It's all very well to be able to crack DES in 3.5 hours, but I don't know of too many people who obligingly send out the plaintext and cyphertext of a message together, or in some other way combinable. If U can get the plaintext of a DES-encrypted msg then U don't need to dick around with DES anyway. No-one ever said it was bulletproof; a direct consequence is that DES users change their keys awful frequently. David Landgren <david.landgren@oecd.fr> <dlandgren@bix.com> [standard disclaimer: this is my personal point of view] A B O L I S H F E A R -- E S T A B L I S H T R U S T