The EFF's US$250,000 DES cracking machine contained over 18,000 custom chips and could brute force a DES key in a matter of days — the photo shows a DES Cracker circuit board fitted with several Deep Crack chips

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to perform a brute force search of DES's keyspace; that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that DES's key is not long enough to be secure. Download high resolution version (1412x1479, 336 KB)DES Cracker circuit board fitted with Deep Crack chips Source: http://www. ... Download high resolution version (1412x1479, 336 KB)DES Cracker circuit board fitted with Deep Crack chips Source: http://www. ... The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit advocacy and legal organization with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving first amendment rights in the context of todays digital age. ... See also: Topics in cryptography The security of all practical encryption schemes remains unproven, both for symmetric and asymmetric schemes. ... The EFF uses the blue ribbon as symbolism for their Free Speech defense. ... In computer science, a brute-force search consists of systematically enumerating every possible solution of a problem until a solution is found, or all possible solutions have been exhausted. ... This article is about the DES encryption algorithm. ... A key is a piece of information that controls the operation of a cryptography algorithm. ...

Background

DES uses a 56-bit key, meaning that there are 2⁵⁶ possible keys under which a message can be encrypted. This is approximately 7.21 × 10¹⁶ (more than 72 quadrillion). When DES was approved as a federal standard in 1976, it was thought that a machine fast enough to test that many keys in a reasonable time would cost an unreasonable amount of money to build, or that a machine cheap enough to be reasonable could not test that many keys in a reasonable time.

The DES challenges

Since DES was a federal standard, the US government encouraged the use of DES for all non-classified data. Considering the EFF's success with Deep Crack, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the NSA had also built such a machine, given their considerable financial resources. RSA Security wished to demonstrate that DES's key length was not enough to ensure security, so they set up the DES Challenge in 1997, offering a money prize. The first DES Challenge was solved in 96 days by the DESCHALL Project led by Rocke Verser in Loveland, Colorado. RSA Security set up DES Challenge II-1, which was solved by Distributed.net in 41 days in January and February of 1998. ... This article is about the US government agency. ... RSA Security is a NASDAQ-traded public company. ... Loveland is a city located in Larimer County, Colorado. ... distributed. ...

In 1998 the EFF built Deep Crack. It cost $250,000 to build. In response to DES Challenge II-2, on July 17, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000. This was the final blow to DES, against which there were already some published cryptanalytic attacks. The brute force attack showed that cracking DES was actually a very practical proposition. For well-endowed governments or corporations, building a machine like Deep Crack would be no problem. 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ...

Six months later, in response to RSA Security's DES Challenge III, in collaboration with Distributed.net, the EFF used Deep Crack to decrypt another DES-encrypted message, winning another $10,000. This time, the operation took less than a day - 22 hours and 15 minutes. The decryption was completed on January 19, 1999. In October of that year, DES was reaffirmed as a federal standard, but this time the standard recommended Triple DES (or 3DES.) distributed. ... In cryptography, Triple DES (also 3DES) is a block cipher formed from the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher. ...

The vulnerabilities inherent in DES have resulted in its replacement as a Federal standard by AES. General Designer(s) Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen First published 1998 Derived from Square (cipher) Cipher(s) based on this design Crypton (cypher), Anubis (cipher), GRAND CRU Algorithm detail Block size(s) 128 bits note Key size(s) 128, 192 or 256 bits note Structure Substitution-permutation network Number of...

Technology

The EFF's DES cracker "Deep Crack" custom microchip.

Deep Crack was designed by Cryptography Research, Inc.; Advanced Wireless Technologies and the EFF. The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom DES chips, housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each. The boards are then fitted in six cabinets. The search is coordinated by a single PC which assigns ranges of keys to the chips. The entire machine was capable of testing over 90 billion keys per second. It would take about 5 days to test every possible key at that rate. Download high resolution version (851x837, 164 KB)The EFFs DES cracker Deep Crack custom microchip. ... Download high resolution version (851x837, 164 KB)The EFFs DES cracker Deep Crack custom microchip. ... Paul C. Kocher is an American cryptographer and cryptography consultant, currently the president of Cryptography Research, Inc. ...

References

• Cracking DES - Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (ISBN 1565925203).

External links

• The DES Cracker page on EFF's site (http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/)
• Photos of the machine on Cryptography Research's site (http://www.cryptography.com/resources/whitepapers/DES-photos.html)