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From https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of... "It took the academic
by thombat 7y ago
From https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of...
"It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA "tweaks" actually improved the security of DES. This means that back in the '70s, the National Security Agency was two decades ahead of the state of the art."
- codesushi42 7y agoTalk about cherry picking info. From TFA, if you had bothered to read it: By the mid-1990s, it became widely believed that the NSA was able to break DES by trying every possible key. This ability was demonstrated in 1998, when a $220,000 machine was built that could brute-force a DES key in a few days
- thombat 7y agoTwo NSA issues are getting conflated: (1) Keeping the key size within brute-forcing range. Agreed, they did that and surely wittingly. By the mid-90s nobody doubted they had the computational strength for it; the 1998 demonstration was that any modestly-funded organisation could too. (2) Improving the resistance to differential analysis by changing the S-boxes. This is what the Schneier quote is about: the NSA making a change and refusing to disclose the basis, causing suspicion that this installed a backdoor for them, whereas in fact it was (as far as any public cryptographer has disclosed) strengthening it against a cryptanalytic technique that the NSA didn't want to reveal.