the rest of the key

Eric Hughes hughes at ah.com
Wed Mar 30 10:04:20 PST 1994


> I was just wondering.... If the NSA could get it's hands on half
>(40) of any particular clipper key, wouldn't that just leave 2^40
>to compute? Even with brute force, it's trivial  even next to DES.

"half" is a a random number which is XOR'd with 80 bits.  Both halves
look random.  The XOR of the two halves is not.

Eric






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