Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status

Tom St Denis <tomstdenis@xxxxxxxxx>:

Unless you can prove without a doubt that IBM knew about DC to the
extent we knew in the early 90s then it's really hard to think that IBM
knew about DC in any meaningful context.

Yeah, like Diffie and Hellman did not have any meaningful knowledge of
public key cryptography: their terminology was all wrong, there are
gaping holes in their original papers. But yet this remains seminal
work, they had just come up with the concepts after all, even though
these were just a very crude form of the concepts that we use today.

You may remember that Biham and Shamir found that versions of DES with
random or key-dependent S-boxes were less resistant to differential
cryptanalysis than the actual DES algorithm. This does not imply that
the designers of the DES knew everything about differentical
cryptanalysis that Biham and Shamir had found out by then, but it
certainly indicates that they did have some meaningful knowledge.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: DES doubts. why we use 56 bit key when ony 48 bits are used?
    ... What is the significance of choice of 56-bit Key in the DES ... Why are there 16 rounds in the DES encrypt ion scheme? ... With new sboxes both DC and LC ... Other variations in DES included using a 48*16 bit key [Biham estimated ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Big Brother getting Bigger
    ... The NSA-designed S-boxes in the DES ... turned out to be resistant to a form of cryptanalysis, ... differential cryptanalysis, which had not even been discovered ...
    (sci.materials)