an idle little thought

[m5@vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally)]

I was just sitting here thinking about DES software, when it occurred
to me that (say, in the case of UNIX crypt) a lot of the keyspace is
typically lost because the first 32 ASCII characters are "unfriendly".
Has anyone thought of (or maybe implemented) some sort of DES-type
symmetric cypher (one that uses typed ASCII passwords) and explicitly
allowed, say, 16 byte passwords?  Seems like you could take pairs of
characters and do some shifting and XORing to get better utilization
of the keyspace.

Just a minor little idea.  (I'm waiting on a big "make"... :-)

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