On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:35 PM, pu<[email protected]> wrote: > Unless I misunderstood, you seem to imply that using a mainframe means you > *need* to use weak encryption. That's wrong.
Yes, you misunderstand. Financial institutions use DES today because of backward compatibility. They've been using DES for roughly 20 years now. Banks buy a lot of mainframes and keep them in service for many, many years. That is why new mainframes today *still* do DES as the lowest common denominator for symmetric encryption (their customers have to have it). Sure, newer algos are supported as well, I realize that. But DES is still there and still sees big use in that sector. That's all I mean to point out to the OP who was berating Blowfish.... his ATM very likely uses DES or passes his financial data back to systems that do... now do you see my point? Brad
