gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) (12/05/85)
I heard a roomer that the gov't has quietly dropped the DES "standard". The rumor is that Adi Shamir invented a cipher very similar to DES (using different permutations in the boxes) but designed it with an easy way for him to decrypt things encoded with it. He presented his cipher to the standards bureaus, they thought it was similar in security to DES, then he showed them the back door. They agreed that it was hard to tell whether this had been done when DES was designed, so they decertified it. Anybody know anything more solid than this?