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48-bit crypto latest to crack





By Alex Lash
February 11, 1997, 1:45 p.m. PT

As part of a contest to prove the frailty of low-level encryption, a
European team based in Switzerland cracked a 48-bit encryption code in less
than two weeks.

The codebreaking was part of a contest sponsored by RSA Data Security,
which holds a dominant share of the encryption toolkit market. Part
mathematical challenge and part marketing campaign, the competition urges
contestants to crack various strengths of RSA's algorithms, which scramble
plain text into unreadable ciphers.

The point of the contest is to show that current government regulations
restrict users to levels of encryption that are unsecure. The lowest level
of code, 40 bits, was cracked in less than 4 hours by a graduate student at
the University of Califonia at Berkeley.

The next level, 48 bits, took 13 days to crack by a team of researchers
using 3,500 computers spread across Europe, according to Scott Schnell, RSA
vice president of marketing. For each bit, the number of possible key
combinations increases by a factor of two. Therefore, the 48-bit code was
roughly 256 times more difficult to break than the 40-bit code.

Germano Caronni of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
wrote the codebreaking software and posted it on the Internet for anyone
who wanted to join his efforts.

Strong encryption is considered crucial to protect electronic privacy in
the digital age. Current U.S. government regulations allow vendors to
export up to 56-bit encryption if the vendor agrees to build in a key
recovery system that would help law enforcement officials decrypt messages
implicated in criminal cases. Under current regulations, domestic use of
encryption is unregulated.

Regards,
Chris