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NIST Proposes Abandoning DES

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thanks-for-all-your-hard-work dept.

Mr. Manometer writes "With little fan-fare, NIST proposed yesterday to withdraw the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the Data Encryption Standard (DES) with a Federal Register notice (pdf). NIST is encouraging federal agencies to use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) instead since they feel that DES is 'now vulnerable to key exhaustion using massive parallel computations.' We all knew this day would come as computers got faster & cheaper... and this should put more pressure on folks to use stronger encryption techniques with is a good thing." Some would argue that DES has been insufficient for some time now.

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. arrggghh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny


    .... I was going to write a long, well thought out reply to this story but the IT colour scheme is causing acid flashbacks.

    The horror... the horror...

  2. Man, they are cruel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    They want me to abandon DES and Internet Explorer? Please, NIST, why do you keep recommending against my favorite applications.

    Let's hope we'll never see ICQ and Windows ME on that list.

  3. Which is why... by baudilus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Which is why we have to invent an unrealistic encryption scheme. Then we can use it forever.