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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.

Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.

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Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.

Had one of the OpenBSD Blowfish t-shirts [1] and wore if for many years until it broke. My best memory of it was as an intern in Silicon Valley, when suddenly the CEO who never had seemed that technical, walked past me and one of the secretaries talking and going: "Blowfish, right? Nice!". He earned a lot of respect from this intern that day.

It is a shame that the OpenBSD folks do not reprint their old designs as I would buy about ten different ones in an instant.

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html#4

Reminds me of T-Shirts with DeCSS's code printed on it. Wild times.

Illegal Tattoos: RSA https://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/

DES doesn't really come in 128 bits, and certainly not its SSL implementations. Perhaps you are thinking of AES?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...

You’re right. RC4 was what I meant. See sibling comment.

128bit SSL precedes the AES contest.

DES doesn't accept 128 bit keys. It's native key size is 56 bits which was commonly extended to 168 with 3DES (encrypt-decrypt-encrypt).

You’re right - 128bit SSL 2/3 used RC4 not 3DES. I was misremembering - one did occasional see marketing describe 3DES with two 56bit keys with 8 bit parity checks as 128bit (actual key strength: 112bit) and I was thinking that Netscape and IE SSL had been part of that wave.

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