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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (7521)	10/24/1997 3:41:00 PM
From: Moonray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

Team Breaks 56-bit Crypto, Wins $10,000 Using the power of tens of thousands of linked computers, a group of programmers has won $10,000 by decoding a message encrypted with the most secure technology the U.S. government allows to cross its borders. RSA Data Security, Inc. sponsored the challenge in an effort to point out the weaknesses of the government's current restrictions on the export of strong encryption technology. The message broken Tuesday was encoded with a 56-bit key, the strongest that Washington allows to be exported beyond U.S. borders. Most domestic encryption, such as that contained inside Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers, relies on 128-bit keys, which most experts say is virtually impossible to break with today's technology. "This re-emphasizes the point that we and everyone else in [the US] are at a competitive disadvantage to everyone located outside our borders," said Scott Schnell, Vice President of Marketing for RSA. Countries such as Germany already have announced they will put no length of key restrictions on their cryptography exports, hampering American companies' ability to compete, he said. RSA's 56-bit key challenge, broken Tuesday by an international group of more than 4,000 teams of programmers calling themselves the Bovine RC5 Effort, is the fourth of 13 company contests to be completed. The first was a 40-bit key, the maximum strength allowed to be exported without any kind of restrictions. The challenges go up in 8-bit increments, up to a 128-bit key. "It is our belief that the final challenge . will never be solved," Schnell said. The number of bits in a key refers to the number of digits contained in the solution to an encyption algorithm used to encode a message. With each addition of a digit to a key, it becomes twice as hard to break the code, Schnell said. The Bovine RC5 team used a "brute force" method of decryption, trying each possible variation of digits in the 56-digit key in an effort to find the right one. Working since March, the teams had tried a little more than 47 percent of the more than 72 quadrillion possibilities before they found the right solution, uncovering a message that read "It is time to move to a longer key length." It took Bovine the equivalent of 210 days to break the code using mostly ordinary PC hardware. Schnell warned that using "garden variety computers" was not the most efficient way to break such codes, however. "It's quite possible to build special purpose hardware that could do this orders of magnitude faster," he said. Cryptography experts have estimated that a machine could be built for close to $1 million that could break a 56-bit key in hours or days - a warning that worries businesses that want to conduct secure transactions on line. The RSA challenge is one of several campaigns by which privacy advocates are trying to publicize the flaws in government encryption policy. In Washington D.C., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement forces are pushing heavily for an even more restrictive cryptography policy. A bill relaxing the export provisions on cryptography was introduced early this year and passed with minor revisions through two House Committees. But after a closed-door briefing by the FBI, the House Intelligence and National Security Committees approved amendments that would have kept strict export regulations and required mandatory "key escrow" - a provision that allows the government immediate access to citizens' keys, giving it the ability to quickly decode any such encrypted message. Law enforcement officials argue that they need the ability to quickly decode the messages of suspected terrorists and drug dealers. Privacy advocates liken the scheme to giving the federal government keys to the front doors of citizens' homes. High-tech companies also are pressing hard for strong encryption, arguing that it is necessary to protect applications such as online commerce and banking, and that the cryptography export restrictions put them at a severe competitive disadvantage to companies overseas. The FBI-sponsored amendment was defeated in the House Commerce Committee in late September, but a compromise between the different versions of the bill must be found before the bill goes to the floor of the House o~~~ O