From: "mycal (voices through your head @ 88.1MHz)" <mike@NetAcsys.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 20:16:33 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: misc crypto stuff
Message-ID: <2caa2729.acsys@NetAcsys.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Cypherdudes,

First a prediction, soon the news media will pick up on a major story on
somthing like child porn being transfered around using something like
PGP.  It will get blown out of preportion, and there will be a call to
outlaw anything but government approved government decodeable encription.

The news media will do one of there steller jobs on how bad this encyption
problem is and how there needs to be somthing done about it (see there
handling of gun related stuph).  The cattle, I mean ppl of this country
that still don't know the first thing about computers, and even lots of
those who, do will support the idea that something needs to be done (to
protect those poor children) and congress will pass a law, call it the
"communication security act" (don't you just love the names they choose for
these laws that do the opposite of what they are titled).  And since there
is no crypto lobby that weilds much power (unlike the gun lobby), it will
get passed, despite the outcry on the net, overloaded government email
boxes and editorials from computer rags.

Second, ever wonder why they picked 80 bits for the key length for clipper?
I think they used the same criterea that they used when they picked 56 bits
for DES.  I'm somewhat sure that clipper, like DES is a sound encription
method, but I'm also somewhat sure that 80 bits is not out of the NSA's
realm of attacking if it was neccary (like there not being able to use the
giant back door called key escrow).   They probibly calculated that 80 bits
is strong enough to provide a good level of protection against most cracking
attemts that could be mustered from other governments and orginizations,
but not against theirselvs, at least scailed for the preposed release date.

3rdly and finally,  if anyone is interested I can send them, for educational
purposes only, the source code for Zipcrack.  It hacks Zip V1.1 only, and
does a brute force attack, but it is economical for <7 character passwords.
It could be modified to do things like a dictionary search, but I lost
intrest a couple years ago.  Anyway it is in C and is quite short.

mycal