Editing EFF DES cracker (section)

==Background==
DES uses a 56-bit [[Key size|key]], meaning that there are 2<sup>56</sup> possible keys under which a message can be encrypted. This is exactly 72,057,594,037,927,936, or approximately 72 [[Orders of magnitude (numbers)#1015|quadrillion]] possible keys.  One of the major criticisms of DES, when proposed in 1975, was that the key size was too short.  [[Martin Hellman]] and [[Whitfield Diffie]] of [[Stanford University]] estimated that a machine fast enough to test that many keys in a day would have cost about $20 million in 1976, an affordable sum to national intelligence agencies such as the US [[National Security Agency]].<ref name="vS8tB">{{cite web|url=http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html| title=DES (Data Encryption Standard) Review at Stanford University – Recording and Transcript|year=1976|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220228142103/http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html|archive-date=February 28, 2022|df=mdy-all|access-date=June 26, 2022}}</ref> Subsequent advances in the price/performance of chips kept reducing that cost until, twenty years later, it became affordable for even a small nonprofit organization such as the EFF to mount a realistic attack.<ref name="uIM6F">{{cite web |url=https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker |title=DES Cracker Project |website=[[EFF.org]] |access-date=2013-10-09 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130622022127/https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/ |archive-date=June 22, 2013 |df=mdy-all}}</ref>