Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cs.tcd.ie!csvax1!fmodwyer From: fmodwyer@cs.tcd.ie (Frank O'Dwyer , ext. 1695) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Encryption Message-ID: <8736@cs.tcd.ie> Date: 18 Aug 88 20:21:00 GMT References: <7596@trwrb.UUCP> <886@taux01.UUCP> Organization: Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin Lines: 26 In article <886@taux01.UUCP>, cyosta@taux01.UUCP (Yossie Silverman) writes: > It includes encrypted disk-io, mail > and digital signatures. It has the fastest known implementation of RSE > (note, not RSK) in the world (according to its developers). How fast? With what keylength? (b.t.w. I presume it's RSA you mean. Stands for Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman!) > As a result, today, anyone at > home can crack a DES cypher on his mac with a days worth of CPU. What? I may have missed something but unless there is a method for breaking DES *without* an trying each and every key, then anyone at home would have to be capable of generating and testing 8.3e+11 keys a second to break DES in a day. My humble DES implementation can do about 15 keys a second. I would die of old age before I cracked DES. Diffie and Hellman have suggested that DES can be cracked in about 20 hrs by using 1,000,000 DES devices in parallel.... Cost $20 m to $200m. Not within reach of 'anyone at home'. Unless you know a method which does not rely on exhaustive key search....