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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:41 ADT
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Mon, 20 Jul 1998 18:52:28 -0400
$684.93 is the cost of snakeoil.
That's how much it costs to break a DES key right now.
Take $250,000, divide it by 2, and that gives you the amortized cost of
Gilmore's DES cracker over a single "half-life", one iteration of Moore's
Law. Divide that $125k by the year and a half that half-life takes
(365*1.5), and multiply it by three days, and you get the now proven,
*demonstrated* cost of a broken DES key, which is $684.93. Modulo the
percentage of keyspace searched when the Gilmore hit paydirt, whatever that
was.
$684.93
Not much, is it?
The cost of anything is the foregone alternative.
And, of course, that cost falls by half every 18 months.
And, of course, we haven't even looked at economies of scale, yet, have we?
National technical means, and all that.
So, once again, I repeat: as of last week, DES *is* snakeoil, no matter its
venerable pedigree. (See my .sig, below, to see what I think about
venerable ideas.)
So, anyone who sells DES in an application requiring *any* serious
security, *especially* for commercial financial operations, is selling
snakeoil. It's that simple.
Barring some kind of cryptanalytic prestidigitation, 3DES will probably
work fine, because it has a decent keyspace, which DES doesn't have. And,
note, I didn't say anything bad about 3DES, because it's apparently strong
enough for that reason alone.
But, Ladies and Germs, Boys and Girls, DES itself is now "DED".
It is "kid sister" code. It has "X"es for eyeballs. It is defunct. It is an
ex-protocol.
May it rest in peace.
Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The Philodox Symposium on Digital Bearer Transaction Settlement
July 23-24, 1998: <http://www.philodox.com/symposiuminfo.html>
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:41 ADT