It has been observed that some organizations employ a cryptographic system which employs key splitting as a mechanism to compartmentalize data. In some cases, this mechanism may be vulnerable to a related key attack, similar to the one used to attack Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP).

In one such case, a 3DES key is split into three 56-bit keys. Only one of the three keys is changed for each piece of data encrypted. This company is an ASP which stores customer data, including e-mail and chat conversations for a number of other companies including Fortune 500 organizations. Each customer is assigned two keys that are reused while the third key is randomly generated once for each piece of data that needs to be encrypted. The result is that there are thousands of pieces of data that this company stores in its database that are encrypted with keys that are all related to each other in that they share one or two 56-bit DES keys. Such a system may be vulnerable to attack using a related key attack if the attacker can obtain access to the database and there is a sufficiently large amount of encrypted data stored.