Cryptography Watch

The 40bit RSA Labs RC5 partial known plaintext attack challenge has been completed successfully in 3 1/2 hours on a graphics work station by a university student.

US companies are restricted to using no greater than 40bit cryptography in products they plan to export. One of the most common applications for such cryptographic code is the 40bit SSL capable web browser. This break shows that 40bit encryption is trivial to crack and in no way sufficient for protecting electronic commerce transactions or corporate trade secrets.

The DESChall project has successfully solved the partial known plaintext attack challenge 140 days after the contest’s announcement.

64bit Processors in DEC Alpha computers running digital unix were found to be particularly fast at testing key candidates suggesting that movements to chip architectures with larger word sizes may significantly impact current estimates of how quickly distributed attack feasibility will progress.