[...]

I don't claim to be a crypto analyist... there isn't a whole lot of good
literature on the subject, and the best people don't seem to publish
their work :)  but I rather doubt the approach such folks use is brute
force (sorry to have implied that in my previous post).  The history
of these things is folks find clever ways of limiting the search and
bang from there.

I guess my real problem with Skipjack is I can not believe NSA would
make publicly available a system they couldn't break if they wanted...
it just isn't in their charter.  Remember DES came from IBM, not NSA
and, when first published, was given a useful life of 20 years... I think
we are well past that point now :(

Remember, based on the size of the NSA budget, they spend a lot more
on the technology of decryption than most computer companies spend on
R&D.  I have to imagine their stuff is real interesting...

A friend who once worked for them (he is dead now) said he always enjoyed
monitoring SAC's (Strategic Air Command) crypto traffic :)  and I rather
suspect that stuff is a bit more complex than Skipjack  (Or was it the
military got the stuff from the NSA just like we get Skipjack from them ;)
[BTW, folks, NSA wasn't being given the keys.  And the Walker spy case
shows for some of the systems, the KGB didn't need them either.]
