Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard

Book Description
In the 1960s, it became increasingly clear that more and more information was going to be stored on computers, not on pieces of paper. With these changes in technology and the ways it was used came a need to protect both the systems and the information. For the next ten years, encryption systems of varying strengths were developed, but none proved to be rigorous enough. In 1973, the NBS put out an open call for a new, stronger encryption system that would become the new federal standard. Several years later, IBM responded with a system called Lucifer that came to simply be known as DES (data encryption standard). The strength of an encryption system is best measured by the attacks it is able to withstand, and because DES was the federal standard, many tried to test its limits. (It should also be noted that a number of cryptographers and computer scientists told the NSA that DES was not nearly strong enough and would be easily hacked.) Rogue hackers, usually out to steal as much information as possible, tried to break DES. A number of "white hat" hackers also tested the system and reported on their successes. Still others attacked DES because they believed it had outlived its effectiveness and was becoming increasingly vulnerable. The sum total of these efforts to use all of the possible keys to break DES over time made for a brute force attack. In 1996, the supposedly uncrackable DES was broken. In this captivating and intriguing book, Matt Curtin charts DES’s rise and fall and chronicles the efforts of those who were determined to master it.


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"DES, the workhorse of cryptography and the U.S. government encryption standard for just shy of twenty years (from 1978 to 1997), was used to protect a vast array of sensitive information in the United Stated and throughout the rest of the world. Many cryptographers felt that DES, which was a 56-bit standard, was too easily broken. Computer scientists and industry software experts wanted the U.S. to be able to use and export stronger cryptography. The government resisted, claiming that more robust cryptography would allow terrorists, child pornographers, and drug traffickers to better hide their illicit activities." "In January of 1997, a company called RSA Data Security launched a contest that challenged DES. RSA wrote a secret message, encrypted it using DES, and promised a $10,000 prize to anyone who could decrypt the message, or break the code that hid it. Responding to the challenge and ultimately winning the prize was a group of programmers, computer scientists, and technology enthusiasts who organized themselves into a loose-knit consortium called DESCHALL (for the DES Challenge). They successfully decoded RSA's secret message using tens of thousands of computers all across the U.S. and Canada linked together via the Internet in an unprecedented distributed supercomputing effort. Using a technique called "brute-force," computers participating in the challenge simply began trying every possible decryption key. There were over 72 quadrillion keys to test." Brute Force tells the story of the thousands of volunteers who battled to prove the aging standard for data encryption was too weak and to wrestle strong cryptography from the control of the U.S. government. Matt Curtin, one of the leaders of DESCHALL, explains how DESCHALL broke RSA's secret message and demonstrated to the U.S. governments - and in fact to the world-wide business and technology communities - the need for stronger, publicly tested cryptography.


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