Columbia crypto box

[Pete Chown]

Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:

> Indeed, but it is important to remember just how thickheaded the 
> anti-crypto effort of the '80s and '90s was and how much damage it did.

As a footnote to those times, 2 ** 40 is 1,099,511,627,776.  My PC can 
do 3,400,000 DES encryptions per second (according to openssl).  I 
believe DES key setup is around the same cost as one encryption, so we 
should halve this if a different key is being used each time.  Brute 
force of a 40-bit DES key will therefore take about a week.  In other 
words 40-bit DES encryption is virtually useless, as brute force would 
be available to anyone with a modern PC.

-- 
Pete


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