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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!yale-com!leichter
From: leichter@yale-com.UUCP (Jerry Leichter)
Newsgroups: net.crypt
Subject: RE:  DES Cracked at Waterloo?
Message-ID: <2434@yale-com.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Nov-83 11:06:16 EST
Article-I.D.: yale-com.2434
Posted: Sat Nov 19 11:06:16 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Nov-83 01:47:07 EST
Lines: 18

utcsrgv!outer posted an article from the November 14th issue of the TORONTO
STAR which claimed that a group at U of Waterloo had broken DES.

One of the theory students here - Josh Cohen, to give credit where credit is
due - managed to get in touch with the appropriate people at Waterloo.  (They
are in the Math Department, BTW.)  The newspaper article was incorrect.  They
mistook the previously-discussed work at Waterloo that cracked a particular
proposed key distribution technique to be used in conjunction with DES (based
on discrete logarithms) with DES itself.  A retraction was published in the
next day's STAR.

DES seems to be holding up against analytic attacks - so far.  (There are, of
course, huge arguments about whether the 56-bit keyspace is small enough to
allow practical exhaustive search techniques, as proposed by Hellman several
years ago.)
							-- Jerry
						decvax!yale-comix!leichter
							leichter@yale