E-mail Privacy

[Ben Cox]

rdippold at cancun.qualcomm.com (Ron Dippold) writes:

> Crypt makes use of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), an encryption
> technology that is supposedly unbreakable without spending nearly
> infinite amounts of computer time (although many believe that the
> National Security Agency purposely weakend the specifications to the
> point where they _can_ decode it).

As has been pointed out by others, crypt(1) does not use the DES
encryption standard.  There is a DES implementation out, though, that
someone else mentioned in a post.

Something interesting to note, though, appears on page 450 of "The
Unix System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth, Scott Seebass, and
Garth Snyder (Prentice Hall, 1989, reprinted without permission) in a
footnote:

   Evi broke the Diffie-Hellman key exchange often used with the DES
   encryption method using a HEP supercomputer in 1984.  Although the
   DES algorithm is quite complicated, nothing crypted with DES can be
   considered 100% secure.  The U.S. government has been (rightly?)
   accused of blocking adoption of encryption standards that cannot be
   broken by the NSA.

-- Ben Cox
   ben at wri.com