DES Question

[bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204]

Matthew Ghio writes:
> When using DES to encrypt email addresses, the total amount of data to
> be encrypted would be only 3 or 4 eight-byte DES blocks.  My question
> is: Would CBC or CFB really be effective for such a small amount of data

Assuming you're using a random initialization vector rather than zeros,
yes, CBC or CFB should be quite effective - the first real block is 
essentially XORed with random junk, though of course if they guess the right
key they can check that the block comes out reasonably.  But it does
prevent a brute-force attack where they decrypt and see if they get ASCII,
since they first block is random junk - they're forced to decrypt at
least two blocks of data, which is somewhat annoying for brute-force-search
machines.

		Bill