In what appears to be the first openly publicized breach of its kind, a loosely-organized group of hackers has broken the US Government’s 56-Bit DES encryption standard. The hackers, responding to a $10,000 challenge sponsored by RSA Data Security Inc, broke the standard in four months using what they claimed were ordinary Pentium-based PCs. The publicity stunt, if it could be called that, was intended to support industry pressure on the US Government to up the encryption standard to 128-bit and allow companies to export encryption technology more advanced than the 40-bit cipher that is currently the maximum.
