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Re: [DES] Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challe


> From:          Vincent Cate <[email protected]>
> To:            [email protected]
> Subject:       Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challenge.

Vince writes:

> Press Release
> Anguilla, June 16, 1997
> 
>     Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challenge.
> 
> The Caribbean country of Anguilla has searched through more than
> 2,380,000,000,000 code keys as part of the Deschall effort to break a DES
> encrypted message.  This is in response to a challenge by RSA Inc to show
> that DES 56 bit keys are not large enough given the rapid advances in
> computing technology.  As of June 16th, the entire US military effort,
> represented by Internet machine names ending in ".mil" in the Deschall
> statistics pages, has searched fewer keys.  Anguilla host names end in
> ".com.ai".  Anguilla is a free and democratic country, that does not limit
> key lengths. 


NOT a press release, but true.

  Framingham,MA , June 16, 1997
  
      Process Software surpasses Anguilla in code breaking challenge.
  
  The small software firm of Process Software has searched through more 
  than 25,600,000,000,000 code keys as part of an independent effort to 
  break a DES encrypted message.  This is in response to a challenge by RSA
  Inc to show that DES 56 bit keys are not large enough given the
  rapid advances in computing technology.  As of June 16th, the entire
  US military effort, represented by Internet machine names ending in
  ".mil" in the Deschall statistics pages, has searched fewer keys. 
  Anguilla host names end in ".com.ai".  

This represents 5965 2^32 key segments, or 0.035% of the total 
keyspace. We've got a long way to go.

It's worth noting that the DESChall people claim to have now
searched over 23% of the keyspace, and at the current rate will 
have searched the whole thing about 3 months from now.

They have not released their source code for independent 
evaluation. I for one would feel a lot more comfortable with
DESChall if there was at least some outside review, even if
no general release is made.

Peter Trei
[email protected]