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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1998-07-22 - Re: John Gilmore and the Great Internet Snake Drive

Header Data

From: John Gilmore <gnu@om.toad.com>
To: John Lowry <jlowry@bbn.com>
Message Hash: f1070523c13c93af2926e4f5fed24ddb4cc096104e076dabf9330b0a725e2bb3
Message ID: <199807221318.GAA03684@cygint.cygnus.com>
Reply To: <3.0.3.32.19980720114859.009997f0@dave.bbn.com>
UTC Datetime: 1998-07-22 17:40:12 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 10:40:12 -0700 (PDT)

Raw message

From: John Gilmore <gnu@om.toad.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 10:40:12 -0700 (PDT)
To: John Lowry <jlowry@bbn.com>
Subject: Re: John Gilmore and the Great Internet Snake Drive
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980720114859.009997f0@dave.bbn.com>
Message-ID: <199807221318.GAA03684@cygint.cygnus.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> One lesson I plan to observe - don't encrypt known plaintext unless you
> have to !

The EFF DES Cracker cracks more than just known plaintext (though it's
the easy case).  It also cracks plaintexts whose likely byte values
are known (e.g. all alphanumeric), winnowing the keyspace down to a
size that software or humans can search.  Such a search runs in very
close to the time required for an ordinary known-plaintext search.
See the book for details (www.oreilly.com).

We successfully cracked a DES-encrypted Eudora saved-mail file
provided by Bruce Schneier during our debugging period.  He gave us
the top byte of the key so we could focus on debugging rather than on
waiting to get to the right block of keyspace.  The machine located
the key within that 49-bit keyspace after we fixed a few software
bugs.

	John

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