Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bbn.com!cosell
From: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: Encrypting your data to keep it private
Message-ID: <61912@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 6 Jan 91 15:46:48 GMT
References: <6748@crash.cts.com>
Sender: news@bbn.com
Lines: 21

shiva@pro-smof.cts.com (System Smof) writes:

}I had heard that DES was breakable and it was designed to be that way; all you
}need is enough supercomputer horsepower.

Can you substantiate this?  From what I know about what's been
happening in the ongoing efforts to study DES, this is almost certainly
incorrect in the sense that you intend it.  The best known techniques
still require searches on the order of 2^52 or so [which is a hair
faster than a brute force 2^56 key search, but not much...].  There has
been no evidence of any 'trap doors' in the S boxes [in fact, quite the
contrary:  recent inforrmation seems to indicated that the algorithm IS
sensitive to the choice of S boxes, and the ones actuall used are
apparently as strong as any that have been found [in the wake of a host
of them that are quite weak].  And, in fact, it appears that DES has
had virtually all of its operational parameters tuned to be about as
strong as the basic underlying algorithm will allow, with no evidence
of anything fishy [and certainly nothing that looks like a trap door.]
All of this has been discussed in detail on sci.crypt.

  /Bernie\