[819] in Cypherpunks
Hardware vs software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Hughes)
Thu Jun 3 21:23:43 1993
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 18:01:34 -0700
From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: hkhenson@cup.portal.com's message of Thu, 3 Jun 93 02:16:03 PDT <9306030216.1.2999@cup.portal.com>
>DES is kind of optimised for doing it in hardware, so don't take
>how slow it is in software as the limit for good encryption.
I wasn't saying that DES was the fastest of all possible secure
ciphers. I was saying that DES is the fastest of all ciphers which
are widely believed to be secure. This aspect of security is
moderated by the key length of DES, which is too short to be secure
against a well-funded opponent at present, but which is perfectly
adequate for other purposes.
Eric
