Re: Back doors

From: Walter Roberson (roberson_at_ibd.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca)
Date: 01/05/05 

Date: 5 Jan 2005 03:35:23 GMT

In article <indmt09nqf6m2ui46lsqbg90stbd897dqi@4ax.com>,
David Dalton <dalton@nfld.com> wrote:
:I expect that
:those knowing of the existence of such back doors would
:be quick to poo poo such existence and may even be
:in such cultish subsets of Born Again Christianity themselves.

And how exactly would I go about proving that I am not a member of
such a cult? Considering that if I were a member and did know about
such things that I would possibly consider it to be my religious
duty to lie?

:But perhaps you are right, Walter, though cheap or free
:firewalls are more likely to have such programmed in
:back doors or otherwise have entry loopholes than
:expensive ones, I bet.

Not necessarily. Free firewalls might be open source, and you could
examine the source code and compile it for yourself; and you could
compile the compiler for yourself in case you don't trust the
compiler. As I indicated, though, this gets you into the question
of whether the mathematics of the encryption algorithm is robust
or if there are known ways to break the algorithms. In response
to that, the best that can be said is "A lot of researchers from
all over the world have looked at the algorithms, and the best they
have been able to do is find time/space tradeoffs for DES that
reduces the time effort significantly, but require 1 or 64 terabytes
of intermediate storage." I haven't read the papers myself to
try to figure out how these would scale to 3DES.

http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/memo_des.shtml discusses the 6 known ways
to break DES. 

-- 
Are we *there* yet??

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