Hang on, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't 56bit DES significantly different 
from 40-bit SSL  (which uses a 40bit key for the public key crypto and 
something like a 3000bit key for the symmetric cipher used for the actual 
data transfer).

What I mean is, DES is significantly weaker than the weakest part of standard 
40bit SSL yes?

If I'm wrong, arent a lot of people putting a lot of confidence in something 
that really isnt secure (i.e. all SSL sessions...)??

--
Shane

On Thursday 20 Dec 2001 9:07 pm, TD - Sales International Holland B.V. wrote:
> On Thursday 20 December 2001 14:58, you wrote:
>
> I urge you strongly to advise against that. Although it might be possible
> to downgrade your encryption to 40bit I'd like to make you aware of the
> fact that DES which is 56 bit encryption if I'm not mistaken was cracked
> several times by brute force in UNDER 22 hours by the distributed.net
> people (www.distributed.net). Therefore I would NOT consider 40 bits
> encryption safe and I feel obligated to make you aware of that. You are
> warned now :-) so do as you please.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Ferry van Steen
>
> PS I'm also on distributed.net's mailing list. I once asked why it wouldn't
> be safe then, since distributed.net has a huge load processing power due to
> the number of people that participate. Appearantly it's fairly easy for a
> lot of companies/governments/etc to EASILY!! match that computational
> power.
>
> > Hi,
> > Bit off topic this, but I thought I'd ask anyway...
> >
> > I've been implementing a financial reporting system, in PHP, which will
> > be running on the internet.
> >
> > Obviously, therefore, security is an issue. The system itself implements
> > a username/password login system, but I want to be able to run it using
> > SSL for obvious reasons.
> >
> > My problem is this: The server we have (Red Hat 7.0, Apache 1.3.14-3,
> > open-ssl 0.9.5a-14, mod_ssl 2.7.1-3) came with ssl preconfigured and
> > ready to use. It runs at 128 bit encryption which is fine as far as I'm
> > concerned.
> >
> > The people who will be using the system, however, have a company standard
> > browser which is IE 4 and only supports 40 bit encryption. And for
> > various political reasons they don't want to upgrade all the browsers. So
> > what I want to know is how easy it is to "turn down" the encryption
> > level, and how to go about it.
> >
> > Any suggestions, pointers??? All the documentation I've come across thus
> > far doesn't really cover anything like this....
> >
> > Richy
> >
> >
> > ==========================================
> > Richard Black
> > Systems Programmer, DataVisibility Ltd - http://www.datavisibility.com
> > Tel: 0141 435 3504
> > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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