[Cryptography] Which big-name ciphers have been broken in living memory?
Peter Gutmann
pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Sun Aug 17 07:55:17 EDT 2014
james hughes <hughejp at mac.com> writes:
><Hyperbole >Your grandmother has a windows 3.1 machine running Netscape.
>Should she be banned from accessing her bank over the internet? </Hyperbole >
>Hard question. What is the liability of the bank? I doubt anything…
I realise this is hyperbole, but the fact that this is being put up as a
strawman (strawgranny?) shows how unreal the debate over key sizes (and
algorithms) has become. In this case we have some stereotypical 80-year-old
granny who spams her grandchildren with email about poor Craig Shergold while
running Netscape 2.0 on Windows 3.1, and the security concern is over her use
of RC4/40. Talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees. It wouldn't
matter if she used rot13, she's going to get phished or pwned a thousand times
over before anyone bothers going after the crypto she's using.
Peter.
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