

Whitfield Diffie - jere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie

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jere
>In 1975-76, Diffie and Martin Hellman criticized the NBS proposed Data
Encryption Standard, largely because its 56-bit key length was too short to
prevent Brute-force attack... Their concern was well-founded: subsequent
history has shown not only that _NSA actively intervened with IBM and NBS to
shorten the key size_ , but also that the short key size enabled exactly the
kind of massively parallel key crackers that Hellman and Diffie sketched out.
When these were ultimately built outside the classified world, they made it
clear that DES was insecure and obsolete. In 2012, a $10,000 commercially
available machine can recover a DES key in days.

