Re: Predicting cipher life / NSA rigged DES? ...

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

I had tended to not take too seriously the posts of someone who signs
himself as "Uhh...this is Joe," but the reasoning he displays below makes
me take him more seriously:

At 5:26 PM -0800 1/30/98, Uhh...this is Joe [Randall Farmer] wrote:

>Yes, I think that's what my (inaccurate) model would suggest you do, if my
>guesses as to break probability are close; real, practical cipher breaks get
>rarer after more analysis-hours pass -- i.e., ciphers are more likely to be
>broken in the first year of analysis than the tenth -- so expected lifetimes
>would increase with the amount of analysis survived.

Just so. With one minor caveat: the amount of time should be replaced by
"effort expended."

Clearly there are a lot of flaky algorithms which have been given scant
attention. It would be wrong to assume that the first year spent trying to
break Blowfish is comparable to the first year spent trying to attack
Virtual Matrix Superunbreakable Amazing Algorithm.

But I generally like your intuition.

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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