Brief messages.
Brief messages
According to the Moscow Times, a graduate of the University of California, Yakov Goldberg, reported that he managed to crack the strongest cipher allowed by U.S. law for unrestricted export. It took only 3.5 hours to decrypt it. This demonstrated the weakness of export restrictions that stipulate the length of the encryption key at 40 bits, which makes the encryption extremely weak. The decryption was carried out by trial and error using a network of about 250 workstations. According to university staff, such resources are usually always available to the university community.
The message, encrypted with a 40-bit key, was released as a puzzle to hackers by RSA Data Security, which makes encryption systems widely used on the Internet. The firm, owned by Security Dynamics Technologies, is among dozens of companies trying to get the U.S. government to relax its restrictions on the export of encryption systems. Those restrictions currently prevent American companies and individuals from using longer keys on the Internet without handing them over to government agencies.
U.S. law permits the use of encryption keys up to 56 bits long, provided that the encryption key is deposited with government agencies, from where it can be retrieved if necessary in the event of a threat to national security.
In response to attacks from the public, government representatives claim that the spread of strong encryption systems outside the United States will negatively affect the country's ability to combat drug trafficking and political terrorism. A bill to relax the restrictions is currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress.
At the same time, Internet users and companies that supply equipment for it believe that the current restrictions are detrimental to e-commerce and hinder the widespread use of the Internet for many types of business transactions in private business, since the Internet has no national borders, any message transmitted over the network by a company located in the United States will be considered an export.