Introduction
The Electronic Frontier Foundation began its investigation into DES cracking in 1997 to determine just how easily and cheaply a hardware-based DES Cracker could be constructed. EFF set out to design and build a DES Cracker to counter the claim made by U.S. government officials that American industry or foreign governments cannot decrypt information when protected by DES or weaker encryption, or that it would take multimillion-dollar networks or computers months to decrypt one message. Less than one year later and for well under US $250,000, EFF's DES Cracker entered and won the RSA DES Challenge II-2 competition in less than 3 days, proving that DES is not secure and that such a machine is inexpensive to design and build. The following FAQ answers questions about the government's Data Encryption Standard and the EFF DES Cracker.