[Cryptography] new wiretap resistance in iOS 8?

[Jonathan Thornburg]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 09:13:27AM -0400, Jerry Leichter wrote:
[[about DES]]
> When it was approved
> in 1976, it's not clear even NSA could muster the hardware for a
> brute force attack; in fact, I'd guess not.  The first *public*
> attack wouldn't come until 1999 - 23 years later.

Actually, Diffie and Hellman published their design for a
custom-hardware DES-cracker in 1977:
  Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman
  "Exhaustive Cryptanalysis of The NBS Data Encryption Standard"
  IEEE Computer, June 1977, pages 74-84,
  http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/06/01646525.pdf

Their paper makes fascinating reading even today.

Their design could search the entire 2^56 DES keyspace in about a
day (mean time to solution about 12 hours), at a capital cost which
they estimated at about $20 Million (using 1976 hardware technology).

ciao,

-- 
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jthorn at astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
   Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
   "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched
    at any given moment.  How often, or on what system, the Thought Police
    plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.  It was even conceivable
    that they watched everybody all the time."  -- George Orwell, "1984"