Ciphers Question:

No easy attack on DES has been discovered, despite the efforts of many researchers over many years. The obvious method of attack is brute-force exhaustive search of the key space; this takes 255 steps on average. Early on it was suggested that a rich and powerful enemy could build a special-purpose computer capable of breaking DES by exhaustive search in a reasonable amount of time. Later, Hellman [Hel80] showed a time-memory trade-off that allows improvement over exhaustive search if memory space is plentiful, after an exhaustive precomputation. These ideas fostered doubts about the security of DES. There were also accusations that the NSA had intentionally weakened DES. Despite these suspicions, no feasible way to break DES faster than exhaustive search was discovered. The cost of a specialized computer to perform exhaustive search (requiring 3.5 hours on average) has been estimated by Wiener at one million dollars.