DES3: 12,5,5 or 8,8,8

[HankFay]

Over the years I have seen two descriptions of length max for DES: 12,5,5 and more recently 8,8,8. I have used 12,5,5 recently and it worked on a table.

So: what is the authoritative ruling from the High Commissioner's Office?

thanks,

Hank

PS: for those reading, non-random encryption keys are pretty worthless unless used just once. Using Chilkat, it's really easy to generate a reasonably random key (and no, your computer's built-in randomization, such as from tmpnam(), is not truly random and a guid is unique, but not random):

lc3Keys = psp_ckrandstr(12,.t.,.t.,.t.) + "," + psp_ckrandstr(5,.t.,.t.,.t.) + "," + psp_ckrandstr(5,.t.,.t.,.t.)

where psp_ckrandstr is:

lParameters tnLength, tlUseDigits, tlUseLowerCase, tlUseUpperCaselocal loRand as ckPrng


if !psp_ckunlock()
    return "" 
endif


loRand = createobject("ckPrng")
lcRandStr = loRand.RandomString(tnLength, tlUseDigits, tlUseLowerCase, tlUseUpperCase)


return lcRandStr

psp_ckunlock is just your basic unlock code, which reads the key from a .h file.

Hank

[barrymavin]

Hi Hank,

It's 8,8,8