Why was the EFF DES Cracker built?
EFF designed and built the EFF DES Cracker to counter the claim made by U.S. Government officials that American industry or governments cannot decrypt information when protected by DES or weaker encryption, or that it would take multi-million dollar networks of computers months to decrypt one message. EFF’s machine is not classified and EFF has donated the design to the public domain, thereby ensuring that there is no doubt about whether the machine actually exists or can be built by anyone. Press releases and technical papers alone are clearly insufficient. As a theoretical model, the publishing of plans for a million-dollar DES Cracker in renowned Bell-Northern Research cryptographer Michael Wiener’s 1993 paper, “Efficient DES Key Search,” did not propel this issue into the public debate over encryption. People still deploy DES, and Congressmen blindly accept assurances about its strength. EFF hopes that this machine will stimulate interest in how such a machine works and how one can
