Re: The Upcoming DES Challenge

Orbital mind control lasers made mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos) write:
 
>Peter Trei (trei@process.com) writes:
>>1. I'm astonished at the low level of reaction RSA's announcement that they 
>>will be sponsoring a DES Challenge, with a $10,000 cash prize.
>I'm certainly jumping up and down and cheering.  I said a while back that the 
>life expectancy of DES would be about two weeks if anyone forked over serious 
>cash.
 
I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though - won't the 
US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able to say "It took 10,000 
Pentiums several weeks, noone would bother doing that, so it's safe" (with a 
possible side order of "Safer-SK64 is 256 times as secure, anyone we really 
like can use that provided they hand over the keys in advance").
 
Peter.

Dan Geer writes:
 > 
 >     I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though
 >     - won't the US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able
 >     to say "It took 10,000 Pentiums several weeks, noone would
 >     bother doing that, so it's safe"...
 > 
 > this seems a good moment to remind ourselves
 > that we will never know as much about another
 > cipher as we know about DES.
 > 
 > ipso facto, i'd like to simply use the efficiency
 > of price discovery by auction and see what I can
 > buy the DES-key-of-your-choice for.  my bet: there
 > are a lot of interesting DES keys available for
 > less than $10K

     This is an excellent idea.  Do the rules of RSA's challenge allow
for bribing the holder of the contest keys?  What a headline --

          "DES Challenge Broken In 15 Minutes"

Then there's the rubber hose method....

Patrick May
(who does not advocate the initiation of force for a mere $10k)

>  
> I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though - won't the 
> US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able to say "It took 10,000 
> Pentiums several weeks, noone would bother doing that, so it's safe" (with a 
> possible side order of "Safer-SK64 is 256 times as secure, anyone we really 
> like can use that provided they hand over the keys in advance").
>  

	I'm nervous too, but consider "for only a $10k reward, look at
the effort people went through. People are using DES to protect things
*much* more valuable than $10k."

> Peter.
>  
> 


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I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though
    - won't the US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able
    to say "It took 10,000 Pentiums several weeks, noone would
    bother doing that, so it's safe"...

this seems a good moment to remind ourselves
that we will never know as much about another
cipher as we know about DES.

ipso facto, i'd like to simply use the efficiency
of price discovery by auction and see what I can
buy the DES-key-of-your-choice for.  my bet: there
are a lot of interesting DES keys available for
less than $10K

--dan