Electronic Frontier Foundation

I rushed to buy this book out of fear that it might vanish. Quoting from the description (not updated since 1998, which makes it interesting to read): "Sometimes you have to do good engineering to straighten out twisted politics" Those days of ITAR were so different from now, that I'm not sure someone in their twenties (in 2017, when I write this) can comprehend the strictures placed on research into cryptography, or any discussions of the relative merits of same.

Currently, Amazon has three reviews, written in 2013, 2004, and 1998. It's like time traveling to read them. The 2013 review is from such a different perspective (not dissimilar to the other review on LT, truthfully) that I wanted to reach out and explain why the book was important. From the review: "SO.... this book has pages and pages of CODE that one can copy and run to turn your machine into a code breaker. It includes a section about the history of DES encryption, but is really more for the graduate student looking into the history of code breaking."

Those were different days.

Cracking DES describes the effort, and provides the description of the hardware used, and all the source code (at that time, you could print source code, but not share it in the digital form). Even the printing of it was risky. Bruce Schneier had already plowed the road in 1994 with Applied Cryptography (and he joined Phil Zimmerman in the pantheon for running the risks).

It's worth owning, and reading, even if the historical context is fading away. Those were heady days, and Cracking DES still has the flavor of rebellion about it.

For additional chapters, please see Cryptome:

https://cryptome.org/jya/cracking-des/cracking-des.htm… (mer)

I first read this book shortly after it was released in 1998. At that time, any US crypto stronger than 40-bits was subject to export restrictions under the ITAR regulations. That included 56-bit DES. The implication was that DES was strong, but I don't recall people really believing that - everyone knew that "strong crypto" meant 128-bit (or at least >= 64-bit) even back in 1998.

This is an interesting book in parts. I liked the discussions on the history of DES cracking, the papers detailing research into cracking methods and speeds, and the details of how the EFF went about designing their DES cracking machine. But I wasn't interested in the software source code and hardware schematics that make up the majority of the book, and I found the constant criticism of US politics tiring and repetitive.… (mer)