Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning

[Perry E. Metzger]

David Koontz says:
> Gee, now that mab at research.att.com (Matt Blaze), knows where to find
> the checksum,

Actually, he doesn't. He only knows how long it is, and what went into
generating it. That is enough.

> and by extension the unit id (Which shows up on labels
> in photos on the literature from Mykotronx) - providing a known plaintext,
> maybe someone will start working on the family key?

Skipjack is presumably immune to such attacks except by brute force. I
suspect that short of starting to reverse engineer the chip little
enough is known to provide information on the plaintext sufficient to
even know when you have cracked it. The encryption mode for the LEAF
is said to be unusual. All these things bode poorly for such a crack.

Perry