Editing EFF DES cracker (section)

==The DES challenges==
DES was a federal standard, and the [[US government]] encouraged the use of DES for all non-classified data. [[RSA Security]] wished to demonstrate that DES's key length was not enough to ensure security, so they set up the [[DES Challenges]] in 1997, offering a monetary prize. The first DES Challenge was solved in 96 days by the [[DESCHALL Project]] led by Rocke Verser in [[Loveland, Colorado]]. RSA Security set up DES Challenge II-1, which was solved by [[distributed.net]] in 39 days in January and February 1998.<ref name="BRkMf">{{cite web|url=http://lists.distributed.net/pipermail/announce/1998/000037.html|title=The secret message is...|author=David C. McNett|date=February 24, 1998|publisher=distributed.net|access-date=February 27, 2014|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304000105/http://lists.distributed.net/pipermail/announce/1998/000037.html|archive-date=March 4, 2016| df=mdy-all}}</ref>

In 1998, the EFF built Deep Crack (named in reference to IBM's [[Deep Blue (chess computer)|Deep Blue]] chess computer) for less than $250,000.<ref name="rZLzH">{{cite web|url=http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html|quote=On Wednesday, July 17, 1998 the EFF DES Cracker, which was built for less than $250,000, easily won RSA Laboratory's "DES Challenge II" contest and a $10,000 cash prize.|title=DES Cracker Project|publisher=EFF|access-date=July 8, 2007|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170507231657/https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html|archive-date=May 7, 2017|df=mdy-all}}</ref> In response to DES Challenge II-2, on July 15, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000. The brute force attack showed that cracking DES was actually a very practical proposition. Most governments and large corporations could reasonably build a machine like Deep Crack.

Six months later, in response to RSA Security's DES Challenge III, and in collaboration with distributed.net, the EFF used Deep Crack to decrypt another DES-encrypted message, winning another $10,000. This time, the operation took less than a day – 22 hours and 15 minutes. The decryption was completed on January 19, 1999. In October of that year, DES was reaffirmed as a federal standard, but this time the standard recommended [[Triple DES]].

The small key space of DES and relatively high computational costs of Triple DES resulted in its replacement by [[Advanced Encryption Standard|AES]] as a Federal standard, effective May 26, 2002.