Hellman and DES

[Dave Banisar]

I've talked to Martin Hellman quite a few times (he came to my last crypto 
conference and gave an overview of the field), he has never said that he 
could crack true DES. When DES first came out, he was one of the people most 
actively opposing the 56 bit key as being too small. At the time, he 
estimated that a machine of parallel processors could be built for $10M that 
would crack DES keys easily. DES at the time was only supposed to be for 10 
years and then a new system was supposed to replace it.

Today, he advocates for security that you triple-DES your 
communications/files.

At last word (and I may have missed any advancements in the flame wars on 
sci.crypt), Shamir and Biham had cracked up to 2^^46, thats still quite a 
ways computationally from 2^^56.

Dave