John Gilmore and the Great Internet Snake Drive

[Kent Crispin]

On Wed, Jul 22, 1998 at 06:18:30AM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> > One lesson I plan to observe - don't encrypt known plaintext unless you
> > have to !
> 
> The EFF DES Cracker cracks more than just known plaintext (though it's
> the easy case).

It occurs to me that an interesting use for the eff des cracker would
be the following: since the government asserts that DES is safe, then
a DES encrypted archive of crypto code should be exportable.  So the
next time someone feels the need to export something that is currently
not exportable, simply encrypt it, along with some plaintext, with
DES, trash the key, export it, and send the plaintext and the
encrypted plaintext to the EFF...

This is not a practical use, but it would make an interesting test 
case in court.

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair			"No reason to get excited",
kent at songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html