On 6/11/07, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
On 6/10/07, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
> Not forever. At a time DES was considered to be unbreakable. But now it
> is very much breakable and that too in a practical amount of time.
> Similarly, RSA will become breakable as the technology advances.
Not sure I agree with the flat analogy. The weakness of DES was its
key length -- 56 bits was just right for NSA's supercomputers to crack
the code in a reasonable amount of time back then. 64 bits would have
made it much stronger.
Nope. The DES algorithm cannot be made more "secure". Any attempts at
changing it like increasing the key length, increasing the number of
permutations, cycles etc.. etc.. just weaken it. So the algorithm
cannot be optimized further. Hence, Triple DES was invented :) It has
been mathematically proved that by doubling the key length of the DES
algo, doesnt actually "double" the security it provides. Rather it
just simply remains the same.
One route to breaking a crypt is through algorithm flaws. An open
algorithm will get fixed faster in such a case.
We're not debating about Open or Proprietary algorithms. Long back
itself it was understood that security by obscurity is useless :)
In normal cases, even if computing speed increases by 2 times every
year, all I need to do is increase my key length by a bit to make my
crypt much stronger than required to offset the increase in computing
speed..
Check out quantum computing :)
The most feasible way to break a crypt is to attack the weakest link -- users.
Stating the obvious? :)
--
Regards,
Dinesh A. Joshi
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