Re: E-squad launched to crack criminal codes on the net

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

Reply From: Hal Lockhart <Hal.Lockhart () storagenetworks com>


> Big salaries will be offered to lure high-flying programmers into the
> unit, which will be given a deliberately anodyne name -
> almost certainly
> the Government Telecommunications Advisory Centre.

...

> 'Given
> enough time and
> computer power, most codes can be cracked,' an NCIS expert said. 'But
> cracking a code two weeks after a message has been intercepted is more
> often than not completely useless, given that details of
> deals, time and
> place, are what we need. Real-time information is gold-dust.'

For the sake of the British taxpayers, I hope somebody (Ross Anderson?)
tells the them what a crock of s**t the above is. Any symmetric encryption
algorithm which has had a reasonable review (3DES, IDEA, etc.) has no
attack cheaper than brute force. If the key space is large enough e.g. 128
bits, then the "enough time" works out to millions of years.

Of course what these people are really going to do is find and exploit the
numerous other weaknesses in deployed systems that undermine the
effectiveness of the crypto. In other words, if the best in the world have
not found a shortcut to DES in 20 years, they are not going to do so now.

The comparison to Enigma is more apt than I think they know. The allies
were able to read messages from the German army because they used Enigma
improperly. They never could read the German navy's messages because they
used Enigma more carefully.

Hal

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