‘We were pressured to weaken the mobile security in the 80’s’
January 10th, 2014Via: Aften Posten:
Audestad says that the British were not very interested in having a strong encryption. And after a few years, they protested against the high security level that was proposed.
They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised. The West Germans protested because they wanted a stronger encryption to prevent spying from East Germany. The compromise was a key length of 64 bit – where the ten last bits were set to zero. The result was an effective key length of 54 bit.
