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From: hyatt@DEWEY.UDEL.EDU (Glenn Hyatt)
Newsgroups: mod.legal
Subject: DES
Message-ID: <8603150200.AA29010@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 14-Mar-86 20:15:49 EST
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Posted: Fri Mar 14 20:15:49 1986
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I hadn't heard about DES' alleged trap door.  It's interesting.
I remain puzzled, though.  If DES is such a breeze for the NSA
to crack, why do they fight it so vigorously?  My guess is that
although they may have fairly easy ways to break it (especially
the stream encryption), it still takes a great deal more in
processing time to decrypt and read ciphertext than it takes
just to read cleartext.