Rating:
(11 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Matt Curtin Page
ISBN : 1441918957
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Format: PDF
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Review
From the reviews:
An excellent story about the thousands of volunteers who battled to prove that the aging standard for date encryption was too weak and to wrestle strong cryptography from the control of the U.S. government...It is a worthy book for almost anyone who has a computer.
-Louis Kruh, Cryptologia, Volume 30, 2006
Brute Force is about as entertaining a read as you will get on cryptography. It provides a detailed account of how DES was taken down and is an interesting read for any student of cryptography and the crypto wars of the 1990s.
-Ben Rothke, UnixReview.com, September 2005
Matt Curtin was right at the heart of the Deschall cracking effort, and his book is excellent in describing the day-to-day progress towards the goal...
-Richard Clayton, Times Higher Education Supplement (U.K.), October 2005
"This book is an exciting popular account of an important event nearly ten years ago in the social history of cryptography. … The book is written to tell the story of how the DESCHALL (Des challenge) project came together, to encourage interest in cryptography amongst the young and to make the subject more accessible to people. It would seem to be successful on all counts." (P. D. F. Ion, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2006 j)
"DESCHALL’s goal was to search through 72 quadrillion keys to demonstrate the feasibility of a brute force attack on DES … . Curtin starts with the genesis of DES … . he manages to keep interest alive with a taut but lively prose, a focus on the human element of the story … . the non-technical reader will appreciate the evocative similes … . Perhaps most intriguing in Curtin’s narrative are … the human and social aspect of divvying up the workload … ." (Daniel Bilar, MathDL, November, 2005)
Direct download links available for Free Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard Paperback
- Paperback: 292 pages
- Publisher: Copernicus; Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2005 edition (October 10, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1441918957
- ISBN-13: 978-1441918956
- Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 6.1 x 9.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard
Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard is the story of the life and death of DES (data encryption standard). In the early 1970s, the U.S. government put out an open call for a new, stronger encryption algorithm that would be made into a federal standard, known as FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard.). Numerous solutions were submitted as the DES candidate, including one from IBM. The IBM solution, originally called Lucifer, was chosen to be used as the encryption algorithm. After that, it became known as DES.
DES is the most widely used method of symmetric data encryption ever created. Its 56-bit key size means that there are roughly 72,000,000,000,000,000 (72 quadrillion) possible encryption keys for any given message. DES was always considered a strong encryption method, but strength is relative.
The strength of an encryption system is measured by how resilient it is against attack. From the outset, it was known that DES was susceptible to brute force attacks. A brute force attack, also known as an exhaustive search is an attack against a cryptosystem in which all possible values for the key are attempted - the bigger the key, the more difficult the attack.
It must be remembered that DES was developed long before desktop computers, so the feasibility of a computer that could perform a brute force attack against DES was rendered so expensive and infeasible that the 56-bit key space (in a 64-bit block) of DES was considered strong enough. In reality, Lucifer actually had an original design of a 128-bit block size and 112-bit key size, but politics got in the way, and DES was created in a crippled state from the onset.
By 1997, DES was cracked, and the start of its downfall had commenced.
When approached by the author as to whether I was interested in reading Brute Force, I was-- with some reservations. It has been a while since I hung up my tech strategy hat to go work in the non-IT world. Also, even though I'm reasonably technical, I'm a long way from a Cypherpunk. I was a little concern that it would get too technical for me to really appreciate.
To be honest, I was also curious whether there was enough material about DESCHALL to really warrant a full book. I had been aware of the crack when it happened, and had honestly not looked much further than the "brute force. took several months. ho hum." attitude that the press seemed to be applying to the story.
I am pleased to say that I was wrong to be worried on both counts.
First of all, Curtin is a blessedly clear writer. As he covers topics which are cryptography specific, he explains them. Furthermore, he explains them using simple language so that I had no problem understanding. You do not need to be a cryptographer to read this book.
Second, there apparently is enough material for a full book. Curtin manages to set up a really interesting story that is fully placed in a political and social context. Bonus because he does that without rehashing ground that has been covered about PGP and Zimmerman in other books. I found myself really interested in the DESCHALL efforts. It was particularly interesting to start drawing the analogy with later distributed computing efforts that were essentially tested with this effort.
The foreward by Gilmore was fun enough-- but then, I like his writing and I really like the EFF.
I would recommend this book for someone interested in the history of computing, or for someone with a special interest in security issues.