🚀 go-pugleaf

In <bontchev.718376938@fbihh>, bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de 
(Vesselin Bontchev) writes:

> erc@unislc.uucp (Ed Carp) writes:
>
> > Then again, DES isn't that strong if your keys aren't chosen carefully 
> > (for a discussion of this, see sci.crypt).
>
> 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!

Wow! I wondered how they'd got that past the State Department!

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). There are a lot 
of null strings in its cleartext file formats and so there is one dominant 
ciphertext block.

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.

Ross