DES in real life

[James A. Donald]

At 07:01 PM 1/20/96 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>Thats RC4, and it isn't neccessarily better than RC4, especially if
>the RC4 key length is reasonable. No one really knows the strength of RC4.

The shortness and simplicity of RC4 leads me to believe that it must
be strong.   If something that simple had a flaw, the flaw would have
been found by now, whereas more complicated algorithms, such as DES,
might well avoid discovery of their flaws merely by their irregularity and
complexity, which makes analysis tedious.
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