GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years

Posted Dec 29, 2007 16:35 UTC (Sat) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712)
In reply to: GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years by flewellyn
Parent article: GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years

DES has never been "cracked." AES is at least as strong as DES, it has withstood all of the known attacks against DES.

It's hard to imagine it having a weakness that reduces its strength to something practical to process but I guess it's possible. You have to also understand that the ciphers that have been developed by actual cryptographers in the last 10 or so years that have been "cracked" the crack is almost never actually possible to do, it's just calculatably more efficient than brute force. It usually takes an intractable amount of processing power or storage to perform these "cracks" and the actual crack. Being paranoid, once a cipher has shown one of these weaknesses, it's usually abandoned and considered untrusted. I can't think of a legitimate cipher that has been developed in a long time that could actually be cracked in any practical manner, maybe FEAL or REDOC but those are pretty old.

GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years

Posted Dec 30, 2007 9:12 UTC (Sun) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (2 responses)

DES has never been "cracked."

As a matter of fact, yes, it has.

You have to also understand that the ciphers that have been developed by actual cryptographers in the last 10 or so years that have been "cracked" the crack is almost never actually possible to do, it's just calculatably more efficient than brute force. It usually takes an intractable amount of processing power or storage to perform these "cracks" and the actual crack.

GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years

Posted Dec 30, 2007 17:13 UTC (Sun) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link]

See the above link. 22 hours using a distributed network is not infeasible. And this was in 1999, almost 9 years ago! Computers are much more powerful now, and massive parallel clusters are much more widespread. It's conceivable today that DES could be broken in a matter of hours.

The OP is correct. DES has not been cracked in a cryptoanalytic sense. It has been brute forced because trying every key in a 56 bit keyspace is now practical. Any true crack to a cypher algorithm reduces the keyspace enough to make a brute force search practical. DES is simply weak in the keyspace dept. The math behind it is good.

GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years

Posted Dec 30, 2007 19:30 UTC (Sun) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

Brute force isn't a "crack."

Do the math on AES then, if that's the best way to "crack" it then AES potentially be secure for centuries. And then there is EDE "Triple-AES" if we actually need something better.