[Gllug] Eric S. Raymond.

[Mike Brodbelt]

Bruce Richardson wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 12:45:38PM +0100, Gordon Joly wrote:
> > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/11/2048256
> >
> > And then read this...
> >
> > http://adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271
> 
> Good points well raised.  The 10pm news on Radio 4 was dominated by a
> story about how encryption helps terrorists and how laws to force people
> to use Government-approved encryption (i.e. key escrow) would help the
> fight against terrorism.  They were using completely bogus statistics
> and had some bogus expert telling them that it would take todays
> computers longer than the lifespan of the universe to decrypt messages
> encoded using standard encryption software.

While I completely agree that mandating Government approved encryption
is wrongheaded and will prevent nothing, I'm interested to hear why you
disagree with their expert. Brute forcing a 128 bit symmetric cipher
does take times on that order of magnitude, assuming the key had
sufficient entropy to start with. What makes you think they can crack
these things faster?

Mike.

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