Re: PGP Secure? Nope!

From: Feher Tamas (etomcat@freemail.hu)
Date: 02/28/03 

From: "Feher Tamas" <etomcat@freemail.hu>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 13:28:41 +0100

Hello,

>True the NSA probably have no interest in our discussions. But the CIA are
>starting to. They are trying to hook into everything.
>
>NSA are not interested but if they wanted to they could crack pgp in real
>time i believe.
>
>You can purchase a book off the shelf, which documents how to build a
custom
>machine with custom processing chips for less than a million US and that
can
>crack DES in an average 3 days.

Earlist known DES-cracking chips were made in East Germany for the Soviets,
you could probably buy a few dozen at eBay. Really doesn't matter, because
DES-cracking chips are useless against 3-3-DES, where the problem is almost
DES x DES times harder to bruteforce. BTW, the soviet GOST crypto is a
copycat of 3DES.

3DES's big problem is speed, it is dog slow without hardware accelerators.
And buying accelerator cards cuts deep into your pocket and they are not
easy to verify as trusted, unlike open-source software implementations.

Blowfish may be a good replacement for 3DES.

Sincerely: Tamas Feher.

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