levitin@decwrl (04/30/86)
[sop to the line-eater...] hlpabs!tektronix!reed!mdr asks > Is it realistically possible today for a small country or a large > company to independently secure its communications from organizations > such as NSA or the Soviet equivalent? [NB: I cannot prove everything below....] I seem to remember hearing that during the implementation of the DES, rather than use the long key (128 bits?) proposed by IBM, NSA decided to use a smaller key (64 bits?). I hypothesize that under their short-term projections of computing power available to different groups, that the smaller key was chosen to put an exhaustive search for the key beyond the means of the "small country" and the "large company". Only the NSA would have sufficient resource to conduct such a search. Samuel M. Levitin (preferred net address: potak@mit-reagan) MIT Lab for Computer Science (whose opinions do not necess. agree w/mine)