Phil Zimmerman on 'The Death of DES'

Carl Ellison cme at ellisun.sw.stratus.com
Tue Sep 28 13:46:22 PDT 1993


Single DES is weak, for a known plaintext attack.  I think we knew that.
We didn't know how weak.

We can extrapolate to an NSA machine with 1 second scan of all keys,
perhaps.

So -- 

1.	use triple DES

2.	before using DES, XOR with a stream from a decent PRNG (destroying
	the known plaintext)

3.	in between DES operations, mix bytes up as with	tran (posted on
	sci.crypt occasionally, avbl from me by mail or on ripem.msu.edu)
	-- spreading bytes out within a huge block, further hiding any
	known text

 - Carl






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