Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics \& Chip Design. How Federal Agencies Subvert Privacy

Tags: 1990s Crypto Wars Crypto Wars I EFF

Authors: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Published: 1998

URL: http://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec

Abstract: In 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group dedicated to the promotion of internet civil liberties, published a book detailing the Foundation’s $210,000 research project to build a machine to crack Data Encryption Standard (DES) – a DES Cracker. The book features an overview of the basic architecture of the machine; design and hardware specifications; and technical design specifications, such as the software source code, chip source code, chip simulator source code, and hardware board schematics, which enable any cryptographer to replicate their work. The motivation for the project, according to the Foundation, was to expose the “vulnerability of widely used encryption standards like DES” and to counter political discourse on DES capabilities and encryption writ large the Foundation considered to be “at odds with [their] own estimates and those of the cryptographic research community.”