> Actually this systems didn’t. In the early 80s most protocols were still ASCII based.

DES was standardised in '77. In use, before that. SSL was not the first time the world adopted encrypted protocols.

The NSA wouldn't have weakened the standard, it was something nobody used.

DES wasn’t common place though (or at least not on the mainframes I worked on). But maybe than says more about the places I worked early on in my career?

Also DES is trivial to crack because it has a short key length.

Longer keys require more compute power and thus the system requirements to handle encryption increase as the hardware to decrypt becomes more powerful.

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shakna 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The box size at IBM was larger before standardisation. DES is trivial to break, because of NSA involvement in weakening all the corners. [0]

> In the development of the DES, NSA convinced IBM that a reduced key size was sufficient;

Minitel used DES, and other security layers, and was in use for credit cards, hospitals, and a bunch of other places. The "French web" very nearly succeeded, and did have these things in '85. It wasn't just mainframes - France gave away Minitel terminals to the average household.

[0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/...

	▲	hnlmorg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I’d written about minitel in a tech journal several years back. It’s a fascinating piece of technology but safely never got to see one in real life. I worked for one payroll mainframe in the 80s that didn’t have DES. So it wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as you might think. But it does still sound like it was vastly more widespread than I realised too.