[IIU] Re: [ILUG] FW: ALERT: EU storing all net traffic

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Kelly (longword at esatclear.ie):

> The NSA had a 20 year plus lead on the discovery of differential 
> cryptanalysis. 

You're probably basing this on Biham and Shamir's 1990 paper, right?
So, that's a point, and a 20-year lead on a new form of attack is
nothing to sneeze at, but this particular technique was never all _that_
productive:  It shortens your attack time on the keyspace a little, by
letting you decide which classes of keys are somewhat more probable 
than another, but it's hardly a magic skeleton key.  (It's also usable
only against a narrow class of ciphers that repeat a per-se fairly weak
algorithm multiple times.)

I would be really suprised at any lengthy monopoly the spooks might
enjoy over any really fundamental advance, e.g., factoring large
numbers.

(Disclaimer:  I'm just another crypto hobbyist with woefully out of date
knowledge, such as it is.)

-- 
Cheers,               "That article and its poster have been cancelled." 
Rick Moen                   -- David B. O'Donnel, sysadmin for America Online
rick at linuxmafia.com