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Justice Department Upgrading Crypto
Mike Hudack
Editor-in-Chief
The US Justice Department has decided that 56-bit DES encryption is simply not enough anymore. The Department, in cooperation with the Government Accounting Office, has announced that all DOJ virtual private networks and firewalls utilizing DES are to be upgraded to 3DES.
DES has been cracked relatively routinely by civilians and it´s expected that the NSA and other spy agencies have been capable of cracking DES for years. There´s even a book out, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about how to crack the encryption standard.
3DES is actually simply DES run three times. The plaintext is encrypted once, run through the DES algorithm again, and then again.
The GAO requires that a waiver be granted if certain systems stray from the use of DES. A waiver was posted online stating that an upgrade to 3DES was in progress.
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