[66975] in Cypherpunks
Re: Clipper III on the table
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Tue Oct 1 15:12:29 1996
To: stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 01 Oct 1996 10:06:40 PDT."
<199610011706.NAA14852@attrh1.attrh.att.com>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 1996 14:44:35 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
stewarts@ix.netcom.com writes:
> Hip Hip Hooray! Clinton will finally let us use _some_
> 20+year-old encryption code, which has been known to be relatively
> weak for 15 years, as long as we give them all our keys! What a guy!
I personally don't mind forcing escrow of 56 bit keys so long as
people can use 128 bit keys without escrow. >:-)
> I assume he's partly doing this to make a big "See, I'm in favor
> of high-tech trade and crime-fighting" push in time for the election,
> and unlike RC4/40, cracking DES on general-purpose processors
> _is_ a big enough job that probably can't do a distributed crack
> in two weeks.
We really have to work on cracking DES at least once -- it would
substantially reduce the wind in the Administration's sails.
Perry
