OCR: 7.0 Security Issues There are several security issues involved with using (and trusting) RIPEM Mac which you should be aware of This section not meant to be comprehensive but is meant to list some of the more important issues The cryptographic operations performed by RIPEM Mac are generally accepted as being secure However the message encryption algorithm, DES, has small key space of only 56 bits With sufficient computing power, brute force key exhaustive attack (i.e tr all ^56 keys) is possible in a matter of days to months with the former estimate applicable only if the adversary has 1000s of dedicated DES hardware devices to breaking your message However, note that each message is encrypted with a random key so successful attack on one message does not jeopardize the security of your ot ...
