🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct6.153908.1597@infodev.cam.ac.uk>, 
rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk (Ross Anderson) writes:
|> In <bontchev.718376938@fbihh>, bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de 
|> (Vesselin Bontchev) writes:
|> > DES is strong enough. In fact, you have to choose very carefully, if
|> > you want to get weak keys... :-) There are only 4 weak keys in the
|> > whole 2^56 keyspace...
|> 
|> I looked at what a PC dealer said was the top-selling office automation 
|> suite. It was called Da Vinci or something like that. Look, it's even 
|> got DES encryption!
|> .................
|> Until I had a closer look, that is. It takes one password of up to eight
|> characters and produces a ciphertext file with visible eight-byte block
|> patterns - must be ECB (or something similar but homemade).
|> 
|> Looks like a PC will be enough to do keysearch on this one: just encrypt
|> a null string with all the passwords in a dictionary, and sort the list.

Looks like that? OK, try to break it on your PC and post the result (:-).

Now seriously - it's still unfeasible to break on your home PC,
or on your business supercomputer. There still are those 2^56
space for the key, though that stupid ECB mode definitely
makes it easier for various attacks (and I thought that
nobody is using ECB in the real world :-). Those
patterns you spotted aren't going to help you
much - in order to be able to apply those
you'll have to have more than 2^40 of
those 8-bytes blocks with known
corresponding plaintext (:-).