At 5:10 pm on Wednesday July 15, 1998, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) successfully cracked RSA Laboratories' DES Challenge II that began 56 hours earlier. The machine that cracked the DES Challenge was built by EFF and is the first unclassified hardware for easily decrypting messages encoded with the government's 56-bit DES (Data Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm (definition below). Technical publisher O'Reilly and Associates has joined with EFF to publish Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, & Chip Design. Authored by EFF, the book reveals full technical details on how researchers and data-recovery engineers can build a working DES Cracker like the one that won the RSA Challenge.
Cracking DES provides other researchers with the necessary data to fully reproduce, validate, or improve EFF's design. It includes design specifications and board schematics, as well as full source code for the custom chip, a chip simulator, and the software that drives the system. The Data Encryption Standard withstood the test of time for twenty years. This book shows exactly how it was brought down. Every cryptographer, security designer, and student of cryptography policy should read this book to understand how the world changed as it fell.
Cracking DES has been published only in print because US export controls on encryption make it a crime to publish such information on the Internet, but the book is designed to be easy to scan into computers. (EFF is also sponsoring a lawsuit by Professor Daniel Bernstein to overturn the law and regulations that make Internet publication of such research results illegal. The case now rests with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.)
