From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 13:23:03 -0400 (EDT) Doing to 3des means you (roughly) triple the attack time, which means that in about 2 years, we'll be back where we are today. This does not fit with my understanding of 3DES. I thought that 3DES effectively tripled the key size, i. e. you have to derive three DES keys simultaneously in order to crack. This should make the attack time significantly greater than 3 times the DES attack time. If it is merely the case of deriving three keys independently, 3DES is already useless. Since people often compare the security of 3DES to IDEA, I don't think that this is the case. Rick