Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard

Matt Curtin9780387201092, 0-387-20109-2

“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.