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From: levitin@decwrl
Newsgroups: net.crypt
Subject: Re: who can be secure
Message-ID: <2665@decwrl>
Date: Wed, 30-Apr-86 03:23:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.2665
Posted: Wed Apr 30 03:23:00 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 11-May-86 16:58:41 EDT
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[sop to the line-eater...]

hlpabs!tektronix!reed!mdr asks
> Is it realistically possible today for a small country or a large
> company to independently secure its communications from organizations
> such as NSA or the Soviet equivalent?

[NB: I cannot prove everything below....]
I seem to remember hearing that during the implementation of the DES,
rather than use the long key (128 bits?) proposed by IBM, NSA decided
to use a smaller key (64 bits?). I hypothesize that under their 
short-term projections of computing power available to different groups,
that the smaller key was chosen to put an exhaustive search for the key
beyond the means of the "small country" and the "large company". Only 
the NSA would have sufficient resource to conduct such a search.

Samuel M. Levitin   (preferred net address: potak@mit-reagan)
MIT Lab for Computer Science (whose opinions do not necess. agree w/mine)