To: coderpunks@toad.com
From: Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com>
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 17, 1998
CONTACTS:
Alexander Fowler, +1 202 462 5826, afowler@eff.org
Barry Steinhardt, +1 415 436 9333 ext. 102, barrys@eff.org
John Gilmore, +1 415 221 6524, gnu@toad.com
"EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION PROVES THAT DES IS NOT SECURE
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today raised
the level of honesty in crypto politics by revealing that the Data
Encryption Standard (DES) is insecure. The U.S. government has long
pressed industry to limit encryption to DES (and even weaker forms),
without revealing how easy it is to crack. Continued adherence to this
policy would put critical infrastructures at risk; society should choose a
different course.
To prove the insecurity of DES, EFF built the first unclassified hardware
for cracking messages encoded with it. On Wednesday of this week the EFF
DES Cracker, which was built for less than $250,000, easily won RSA
Laboratory's "DES Challenge II" contest and a $10,000 cash prize. It took
the machine less than 3 days to complete the challenge, shattering the
previous record of 39 days set by a massive network of tens of thousands
of computers. The research results are fully documented in a book
published this week by EFF and O'Reilly and Associates, entitled "Cracking
DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design."
"Producing a workable policy for encryption has proven a very hard
political challenge. We believe that it will only be possible to craft
good policies if all the players are honest with one another and the
public," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader. "When the
government won't reveal relevant facts, the private sector must
independently conduct the research and publish the results so that we can
all see the social trade-offs involved in policy choices."
The nonprofit foundation designed and built the EFF DES Cracker to counter
the claim made by U.S. government officials that governments cannot
decrypt information when protected by DES, or that it would take
multimillion-dollar networks of computers months to decrypt one message.
"The government has used that claim to justify policies of weak encryption
and 'key recovery,' which erode privacy and security in the digital age,"
said EFF Executive Director Barry Steinhardt. It is now time for an
honest and fully informed debate, which we believe will lead to a reversal
of these policies."
"EFF has proved what has been argued by scientists for twenty years, that
DES can be cracked quickly and inexpensively," said Gilmore. "Now that
the public knows, it will not be fooled into buying products that promise
real privacy but only deliver DES. This will prevent manufacturers from
buckling under government pressure to 'dumb down' their products, since
such products will no longer sell." Steinhardt added, "If a small
nonprofit can crack DES, your competitors can too. Five years from now
some teenager may well build a DES Cracker as her high school science fair
project."
The Data Encryption Standard, adopted as a federal standard in 1977 to
protect unclassified communications and data, was designed by IBM and
modified by the National Security Agency. It uses 56-bit keys, meaning a
user must employ precisely the right combination of 56 1s and 0s to decode
information correctly. DES accounted for more than $125 million annually
in software and hardware sales, according to a 1993 article in "Federal
Computer Week." Trusted Information Systems reported last December that
DES can be found in 281 foreign and 466 domestic encryption products,
which accounts for between a third and half of the market.
A DES cracker is a machine that can read information encrypted with DES by
finding the key that was used to encrypt that data. DES crackers have
been researched by scientists and speculated about in the popular
literature on cryptography since the 1970s. The design of the EFF DES
Cracker consists of an ordinary personal computer connected to a large
array of custom chips. It took EFF less than one year to build and cost
less than $250,000.
This week marks the first public test of the EFF DES Cracker, which won
the latest DES-cracking speed competition sponsored by RSA Laboratories
(http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/). Two previous RSA challenges proved that
massive collections of computers coordinated over the Internet could
successfully crack DES. Beginning Monday morning, the EFF DES Cracker
began searching for the correct answer to this latest challenge, the RSA
DES Challenge II-2. In less than 3 days of searching, the EFF DES Cracker
found the correct key. "We searched more than 88 billion keys every
second, for 56 hours, before we found the right 56-bit key to decrypt the
answer to the RSA challenge, which was 'It's time for those 128-, 192-,
and 256-bit keys,'" said Gilmore.
Many of the world's top cryptographers agree that the EFF DES Cracker
represents a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer security
and the public policies that control its use. "With the advent of the EFF
DES Cracker machine, the game changes forever," said Whitfield Diffie,
Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and famed co-inventor of public
key cryptography. "Vast Internet collaborations cannot be concealed and
so they cannot be used to attack real, secret messages. The EFF DES
Cracker shows that it is easy to build search engines that can."
"The news is not that a DES cracker can be built; we've known that for
years," said Bruce Schneier, the President of Counterpane Systems. "The
news is that it can be built cheaply using off-the-shelf technology and
minimal engineering, even though the department of Justice and the FBI
have been denying that this was possible." Matt Blaze, a cryptographer at
AT&T Labs, agreed: "Today's announcement is significant because it
unambiguously demonstrates that DES is vulnerable, even to attackers with
relatively modest resources. The existence of the EFF DES Cracker proves
that the threat of "brute force" DES key search is a reality. Although
the cryptographic community has understood for years that DES keys are
much too small, DES-based systems are still being designed and used today.
Today's announcement should dissuade anyone from using DES."
EFF and O'Reilly and Associates have published a book about the EFF DES
Cracker, "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics,
and Chip Design." The book contains the complete design details for the
EFF DES Cracker chips, boards, and software. This provides other
researchers with the necessary data to fully reproduce, validate, and/or
improve on EFF's research, an important step in the scientific method.
The book is only available on paper because U.S. export controls on
encryption potentially make it a crime to publish such information on the
Internet.
EFF has prepared a background document on the EFF DES Cracker, which
includes the foreword by Whitfield Diffie to "Cracking DES." See
http://www.eff.org/descracker/. The book can be ordered for worldwide
delivery from O'Reilly & Associates at
http://www.ora.com/catalog/crackdes, +1 800 998 9938, or +1 707 829 0515.
**********
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil liberties
organizations devoted to ensuring that the Internet remains the world's
first truly global vehicle for free speech, and that the privacy and
security of all on-line communication is preserved. Founded in 1990 as a
nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San Francisco,
California. EFF maintains an extensive archive of information on
encryption policy, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alexander Fowler
Director of Public Affairs
Electronic Frontier Foundation
E-mail: afowler@eff.org
Tel/Fax: 202 462 5826 (East Coast)
Tel: 415 436 9333; Fax 415 436 9993 (West Coast)
You can find EFF on the Web at <http://www.eff.org>
EFF supports the Global Internet Liberty Campaign
<http://www.gilc.org>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**********************************************************************
Bruce Schneier, President, Counterpane Systems Phone: 612-823-1098
101 E Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis, MN 55419 Fax: 612-823-1590
Free crypto newsletter. See: http://www.counterpane.com
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Received on Mon Jul 20 14:12:22 1998