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Re: EFF misstatements in DeCSS brief
In article <[email protected]>,
lcs Mixmaster Remailer <[email protected]> wrote:
> In <v04210107b49ec5fed054@[63.193.122.223]>, Martin Minow <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > Not being a skilled cryptanalyst, I defer to others to determine
> > the difficulty represented by 4 GB of plaintext/cyphertext,
> > a 40 bit key, and the economic/technical constraints on consumer
> > hardware.
>
> A trivial example where even arbitrary amounts of plaintext+ciphertext
> plus knowledge of a 40-bit key will not help: [...]
Obviously, there exist ciphers which are apparently extremely hard to
deduce given just plaintext/ciphertext.
But should we necessarily believe that the CSS is one of them? The CSS
is an extremely weak cipher design, with plenty of trivial attacks. I
think it is entirely possible that these design flaws are serious enough
to reveal the cipher structure to anyone patient enough to look carefully.
In fact, in a separate post, I present a detailed explanation of a scenario
where it seems that a talented cryptanalyst might plausibly recover the
entire CSS algorithm using only some known plaintext/ciphertext!