"EFF DES Cracker" machine brings honesty to crypto debate

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 17, 1998

CONTACTS:
   Alexander Fowler, +1 202 462 5826, afowler@eff.org
   Barry Steinhardt, +1 415 436 9333 ext. 102, barrys@eff.org
   John Gilmore, +1 415 221 6524, gnu@toad.com

  "EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE

 ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION PROVES THAT DES IS NOT SECURE

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today
raised the level of honesty in crypto politics by revealing that the
Data Encryption Standard (DES) is insecure.  The U.S. government has
long pressed industry to limit encryption to DES (and even weaker
forms), without revealing how easy it is to crack.  Continued adherence
to this policy would put critical infrastructures at risk; society
should choose a different course.

To prove the insecurity of DES, EFF built the first unclassified
hardware for cracking messages encoded with it.  On Wednesday of this
week the EFF DES Cracker, which was built for less than $250,000,
easily won RSA Laboratory's "DES Challenge II" contest and a $10,000
cash prize.  It took the machine less than 3 days to complete the
challenge, shattering the previous record of 39 days set by a massive
network of tens of thousands of computers.  The research results are
fully documented in a book published this week by EFF and O'Reilly and
Associates, entitled "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research,
Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design."

"Producing a workable policy for encryption has proven a very hard
political challenge.  We believe that it will only be possible to
craft good policies if all the players are honest with one another and
the public," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader.  "When
the government won't reveal relevant facts, the private sector must
independently conduct the research and publish the results so that we
can all see the social trade-offs involved in policy choices."

The nonprofit foundation designed and built the EFF DES Cracker to
counter the claim made by U.S. government officials that governments
cannot decrypt information when protected by DES, or that it would
take multimillion-dollar networks of computers months to decrypt one
message.  "The government has used that claim to justify policies of
weak encryption and 'key recovery,' which erode privacy and security
in the digital age," said EFF Executive Director Barry Steinhardt.  It
is now time for an honest and fully informed debate, which we believe
will lead to a reversal of these policies."

"EFF has proved what has been argued by scientists for twenty years,
that DES can be cracked quickly and inexpensively," said Gilmore.
"Now that the public knows, it will not be fooled into buying products
that promise real privacy but only deliver DES.  This will prevent
manufacturers from buckling under government pressure to 'dumb down'
their products, since such products will no longer sell."  Steinhardt
added, "If a small nonprofit can crack DES, your competitors can too.
Five years from now some teenager may well build a DES Cracker as her
high school science fair project."

The Data Encryption Standard, adopted as a federal standard in 1977 to
protect unclassified communications and data, was designed by IBM and
modified by the National Security Agency.  It uses 56-bit keys,
meaning a user must employ precisely the right combination of 56 1s
and 0s to decode information correctly.  DES accounted for more than
$125 million annually in software and hardware sales, according to a
1993 article in "Federal Computer Week."  Trusted Information Systems
reported last December that DES can be found in 281 foreign and 466
domestic encryption products, which accounts for between a third and
half of the market.

A DES cracker is a machine that can read information encrypted with
DES by finding the key that was used to encrypt that data.  DES
crackers have been researched by scientists and speculated about in
the popular literature on cryptography since the 1970s.  The design
of the EFF DES Cracker consists of an ordinary personal computer
connected to a large array of custom chips.  It took EFF less than
one year to build and cost less than $250,000.

This week marks the first public test of the EFF DES Cracker, which
won the latest DES-cracking speed competition sponsored by RSA
Laboratories (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/).  Two previous RSA
challenges proved that massive collections of computers coordinated
over the Internet could successfully crack DES.  Beginning Monday
morning, the EFF DES Cracker began searching for the correct answer to
this latest challenge, the RSA DES Challenge II-2.  In less than 3
days of searching, the EFF DES Cracker found the correct key.  "We
searched more than 88 billion keys every second, for 56 hours, before
we found the right 56-bit key to decrypt the answer to the RSA
challenge, which was 'It's time for those 128-, 192-, and 256-bit
keys,'" said Gilmore.

Many of the world's top cryptographers agree that the EFF DES Cracker
represents a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer
security and the public policies that control its use.  "With the
advent of the EFF DES Cracker machine, the game changes forever," said
Whitfield Diffie, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and famed
co-inventor of public key cryptography.  "Vast Internet collaborations
cannot be concealed and so they cannot be used to attack real, secret
messages.  The EFF DES Cracker shows that it is easy to build search
engines that can."

"The news is not that a DES cracker can be built; we've known that for
years," said Bruce Schneier, the President of Counterpane Systems.
"The news is that it can be built cheaply using off-the-shelf technology
and minimal engineering, even though the department of Justice and the FBI
have been denying that this was possible."  Matt Blaze, a cryptographer
at AT&T Labs, agreed: "Today's announcement is significant because it
unambiguously demonstrates that DES is vulnerable, even to attackers with
relatively modest resources.  The existence of the EFF DES Cracker proves
that the threat of "brute force" DES key search is a reality.  Although
the cryptographic community has understood for years that DES keys are
much too small, DES-based systems are still being designed and used
today.  Today's announcement should dissuade anyone from using DES."

EFF and O'Reilly and Associates have published a book about the EFF
DES Cracker, "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap
Politics, and Chip Design."  The book contains the complete design
details for the EFF DES Cracker chips, boards, and software.  This
provides other researchers with the necessary data to fully reproduce,
validate, and/or improve on EFF's research, an important step in the
scientific method.  The book is only available on paper because
U.S. export controls on encryption potentially make it a crime to
publish such information on the Internet.

EFF has prepared a background document on the EFF DES Cracker, which
includes the foreword by Whitfield Diffie to "Cracking DES."  See
http://www.eff.org/descracker/.  The book can be ordered for worldwide
delivery from O'Reilly & Associates at http://www.ora.com/catalog/crackdes,
+1 800 998 9938, or +1 707 829 0515.

                              **********

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil liberties
organizations devoted to ensuring that the Internet remains the world's
first truly global vehicle for free speech, and that the privacy and
security of all on-line communication is preserved.  Founded in 1990 as a
nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San Francisco,
California.  EFF maintains an extensive archive of information on
encryption policy, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org.