5 ms·
The secrecy around this is precisely the opposite of what we saw in the 90s when it started to become clear DES needed to go. Yet another sign that the global p
by ls612 6mo ago
The secrecy around this is precisely the opposite of what we saw in the 90s when it started to become clear DES needed to go. Yet another sign that the global powers are preparing for war.
- NitpickLawyer 6mo agoMy read of the recent google blog post is that they framed it as cryptocurrency related stuff just so they don't say the silent thing out loud. But lots of people "in the know" / working on this are taking it much more seriously than just cryptobros go broke. So my hunch is that there's more to it and they didn't want to say it / couldn't / weren't allowed to.
- IncreasePosts 6mo agoWhat is "it" that you're referring to?
- wil421 6mo ago> mitigating harvest-now/decrypt-later attacks. Most likely the NSA or someone else is ahead of the game and already has a quantum computer. If the tech news rumors are to true the NSA has a facility in Utah that can gather large swaths of the internet and process the data.
- adrian_b 6mo agoIt should be noted that quantum computers are a threat mainly for interactions between unrelated parties which perform legal activities, e.g. online shopping, online banking, notarized legal documents that use long-term digital signatures. Quantum computers are not a threat for spies or for communications within private organizations where security is considered very important, where the use of public-key cryptography can easily be completely avoided and authentication and session key exchanges can be handled with pre-shared secret keys used only for that purpose.
- dadrian 6mo agoI will bring this up at the next meeting of the secret cryptographer cabal where we decide what information to reveal to non-cryptographers.
- tptacek 6mo agoWhat do you mean? For as long as I remember (back to late 1994) people understood DES to be inadequate; we used DES-EDE and IDEA (and later RC4) instead. What "secrecy" would there have been? The feasibility of breaking DES given a plausible budget goes all the way back to the late 1970s. The first prize given for demonstrating a DES break was only $10,000.
- adrian_b 6mo agoTriple-key DES (DES-EDE) had already been proposed by IBM in 1979, in response to the criticism that the 56-bit keys of DES are far too short. So practically immediately after DES was standardized, people realized that NSA had crippled it by limiting the key length to 56 bits, and they started to use workarounds. Before introducing RC2 and RC4 in 1987, Ronald Rivest had used since 1984 another method of extending the key length of DES, named DESX, which was cheaper than DES-EDE as it used a single block cipher function invocation. However, like also RC4, DESX was kept as a RSA trade secret, until it was leaked, also like RC4, during the mid nineties. IDEA (1992, after a preliminary version was published in 1991) was the first block cipher function that was more secure than DES and which was also publicly described.
- ls612 6mo agoPeople were willing to explicitly explain why it was inadequate rather than keep it secret. That is the difference.
- tptacek 6mo agoWhat was to explain? It had a 56-bit key.
- ls612 6mo agoWas that the only thing wrong with it? The 90s was definitely before my time but I was under the impression reading about it that there were also fundamental flaws with DES which lead to the competition which ultimately produced AES.