[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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