... long live DES (sic)

[David LANDGREN, PUB]

>>>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 at oecd.fr>  <dlandgren at bix.com>
 [standard disclaimer: this is my personal point of view]

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