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Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design 1st Edition
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.
- ISBN-101565925203
- ISBN-13978-1565925205
- Edition1st
- PublisherO'Reilly Media
- Publication dateJuly 11, 1998
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7 x 0.57 x 9.19 inches
- Print length266 pages
Product details
- Publisher : O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (July 11, 1998)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 266 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1565925203
- ISBN-13 : 978-1565925205
- Item Weight : 15.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 7 x 0.57 x 9.19 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,447,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,141 in Computer Hacking
- #12,871 in Computer Software (Books)
- #18,001 in Computer Science (Books)
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(this is a generic rough recollection...) The other book told the tale of how DES was weak and computer scientists everywhere wanted the government to enhance the encryption standard since most sensitive personal data was using a key they believed was too easy to crack. Sure enough, individuals, universities, and silicon valley companies banded together to crack the DES encryption standard, not a small feat and resulted in enhanced encryption standards.
SO.... this book has pages and pages of CODE that one can copy and run to turn your machine into a code breaker. It includes a section about the history of DES encryption, but is really more for the graduate student looking into the history of code breaking.
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.
