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A Dispatch From The Crypto Wars, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

Matt Curtin's Brute Force is a primarily personal account of one early effort to harness the power of distributed computing. In 1997, Mr. Curtin and other members of the DESCHALL (DES Challenge) project built, distributed, and managed software that united thousands of computers, many of them ordinary personal computers, in the search for a single decryption key among 72 quadrillion possibilities. The DESCHALL project sought to demonstrate that DES, then the U.S. national standard encryption algorithm, was no longer as secure as advertised. While Brute Force also offers some background on encryption regulation, export control policy, and other aspect of …