Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status

"David Wagner" <daw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Once you understand this context, maybe it makes it easier to understand
why people were prepared to believe that influential elements of the
NSA may have later regretted allowing DES to become a public standard.

Yes, it is possible that some NSA people thought that, but the
same reasoning might lead you to believe that SHA-1 and AES
were mistakes. Do you want to put that in the encyclopedia also?

You have your goofy NSA conspiracy theories, and I have mine.
I say: Drop the speculation, and stick to the facts where we all
agree. Eg:

IBM had unpublished info about possible attacks, and used that
to make the S-boxes stronger. (But we are not sure exactly
what IBM knew.)
IBM got help from NSA. (But the details are not known.)
IBM's influence shortened the key length to 56 bits. (But we
don't know exactly why.)
NBS made DES an open standard. (We don't know NSA's
opinion, either then or now.)



.

Relevant Pages

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