[Cryptography] Quillon Graph: A private, post-quantum electronic cash system

[Peter Gutmann]

Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> writes:

>The real damage that DES did wasn't done by being completely inadequate
>starting just three or four years after its introduction.  The real and
>lasting damage it did was by being standardized.

I would say it was the exact opposite.  Sure, the key was too short, but
everyone both knew that and could follow a line on a graph to see when it
would be a concern, which for most use cases was "never".  Even today, single
DES is probably good enough for 99% of online transactions (think
doomscrolling Facebook, watching YouTube, buying junk off Temu, etc).

The real and lasting benefit it brought was standardisation.  Instead of a
million homebrew pieces of snake oil there was now a well-defined standard
that you could look at and say "this won't be trivially broken in half an hour
by an undergraduate university student" (taking one real-world example used
to, uh, "protect" medical records).  And it fostered a vast amount of research
into cryptography and cryptanalysis, and begat 3DES and from there AES.  As
the NSA said at the time, it was the biggest mistake they ever made.

Peter.