Cracking Des: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design [Paperback]

Electronic Frontier Foundation (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

Sometimes you have to do good engineering to straighten out twisted politics. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that was founded to ensure that the principles embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights are protected as new communications technologies emerge, and O"Reilly, the premier publisher of computer and computer-related books, team up to produce Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design. By doing this they have exploded the government-supported myth that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) has real security.

National Security Agency and FBI officials say our civil liberties must be curtailed because the government can't crack the security of DES to wiretap bad guys. But somehow a tiny nonprofit has designed and built a $200,000 machine that cracks DES in a week. Who's lying, and why?

For the first time, the book reveals full technical details on how researchers and data-recovery engineers can build a working DES Cracker. It includes design specifications and board schematics, as well as full source code for the custom chip, a chip simulator, and the software that drives the system. The U.S. government makes it illegal to publish these details on the Web, but they're printed here in a form that's easy to read and understand, legal to publish, and convenient for scanning into your computer.

The Data Encryption Standard withstood the test of time for twenty years. This book shows exactly how it was brought down. Every cryptographer, security designer, and student of cryptography policy should read this book to understand how the world changed as it fell.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in July of 1990 to ensure that the principles embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights are protected as new communications technologies emerge. To this end, the EFF: Sponsors cases such as the CDA, Steve Jackson Games, and Bernstein v. Department of State and NSA cases, in which users' online civil liberties have been violated. Additionally, EFF submits amicus briefs and finds pro bono counsel when possible for important legal cases. We continue to monitor the online community for legal actions that merit EFF support. Works to ensure that communications carriers do not deny service to network users solely on the basis of the content of their messages and that carriers do not bear undue liability for harm stemming from the content of messages where that harm is actually caused by users. Produces legal white papers informing BBS operators, telephone companies, and public utility commissions about the civil liberties implications of their actions. We monitor legislation and agency actions affecting the online community. We also work with EFF members and groups of members on state and local levels to affect change in local legislation. Provides a free telephone hotline for members of the online community who have questions regarding their legal rights. Speaks to law enforcement organizations, state attorney bar associations, conferences and summits, and university classes on the work that we do and how these groups can get involved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 266 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; First Edition edition (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565925203
• ISBN-13: 978-1565925205
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,025,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Detailed blueprint on how-to-do it., December 3, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Cracking Des: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design (Paperback)

This is a "killer book" in every respect.

The authors have done a tremendous service to the entire population of the World by exposing the vulnerability of the DES algorithm. The DES algorithm is the formula for encrypting your bank account and keeping other secrets safe.

DES has become unless and the authors have taken more than a little risk to inform you including absolute, undeniable proof in the form of "showing you how", down to the last detail.

The books not only gives detailed plans and references but also the correct current political motivation behind the desire to retain the DES and how it affects you.

Details of how government "politicking" of your civil rights and how those rights are being "watered down" for the benefit of the intelligence community is explained, too.

I don't personally plan on spending $200,000 or so to build a "engine for cracking DES", but I do believe that the money spent for this book was one of the better investments I have made. The books contents have been placed into the public domain by the authors. Tell a friend.

Bravo, guys!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Useful to both cryppies and hardware geeks, March 9, 2004

By 

Brian Connors (Yarmouth, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design (Paperback)

In 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced an experiment. On a budget of $200,000, they blew the roof off of something that had long been suspected: the long-time United States Data Encryption Standard was not secure.

This is something that had been suspected for some time. The original Lucifer encrypt that it had been based on had been designed by IBM with a 64-bit keyspace (quite large for the late 70s), but had been reduced to 56 bits, reducing the number of possible keys by two orders of magnitude. It was widely suspected that this was due to the NSA's desire that there not be a standard in the public domain that they couldn't crack; indeed, DES was slowly obsoleted over the years by ciphers like RSA and PGP. In 1997, it was announced that the EFF had created, using an array of custom chips, a relatively inexpensive system that was capable of a brute-force attack on DES, and came to the conclusion that such systems were probably already in the posession of not only the NSA (the largest purchaser of computing power in the world) but also numerous corporate and governmental entities that could afford to pay substantially less than the EFF paid for a technology that was likely not only available on the QT but quite mature.

This book comes with everything needed to build a DES cracker -- operational notes, history, and even the VHDL code needed to build the custom chips and C code to control the chip array. This makes it of interest not only to cryptography researchers (who probably consider this book old news after seven years) but to those learning about hardware and embedded systems development; the extensive listings make for good study material.

It's a worthwhile book to buy for anyone interested in privacy and cryptography concerns, though for the layperson Simon Singh's Code Book is probably a more general introduction to the issues involved.