Editing EFF DES cracker (section)

{{Short description|Cryptographic hardware}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=June 2015}}
[[Image:Board300.jpg|thumbnail|right|upright=1.2|The [[Electronic Frontier Foundation|EFF]]'s US$250,000 DES cracking machine contained 1,856 custom chips and could [[brute-force attack|brute force]] a DES [[key (cryptography)|key]] in a matter of days — the photo shows a two-sided DES Cracker circuit board fitted with 64 Deep Crack chips]] [[Image:Chip300.jpg|thumbnail|right|The EFF's DES cracker "Deep Crack" custom microchip]]
In [[cryptography]], the '''EFF DES cracker''' (nicknamed "'''Deep Crack'''") is a machine built by the [[Electronic Frontier Foundation]] (EFF) in 1998, to perform a [[brute force attack|brute force]] search of the [[Data Encryption Standard]] (DES) cipher's [[Key space (cryptography)|key space]] – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the [[key size]] of DES was not sufficient to be secure.

Detailed technical data of this machine, including [[block diagram|block diagrams]], [[circuit schematics]], [[VHDL]] source code of the custom chips and its [[emulator]], have all been published in the book ''Cracking DES''. Its [[public domain license]] allows [[Open-source_hardware|everyone to freely copy, use, or modify its design]]. To avoid the [[Export of cryptography from the United States|export regulation on cryptography by the US Government]], the [[source code]] was distributed not in electronic form but as a hardcopy book, of which the open publication is protected by the [[First Amendment]]. Machine-readable metadata is provided to facilitate the transcription of the code into a computer via [[Optical Character Recognition|OCR]] by readers.<ref name="crackingdes">{{cite book|title=Cracking DES - Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design|author=Electronic Frontier Foundation|isbn=1-56592-520-3|publisher=Oreilly & Associates Inc|year=1998|url=http://cryptome.org/jya/cracking-des/cracking-des.htm|access-date=2016-10-30|archive-date=2013-10-17|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131017055750/http://cryptome.org/jya/cracking-des/cracking-des.htm}}</ref>