FBI fails to crack encrypted files.

FBI fails to crack encrypted files.

noticias.terra.c om.br

The FBI has given back to Brazil, the hard drives aprehended by the brazilian Federal Police at the banker Daniel Danta's apartment, during the operation known as Satiagraha, in july 2008. After a whole year trying, the FBI gave up cracking the sophisticated encryption system used on the Opportunity Bank's files.

(visit the link for the full news article)





[edit on 25-6-2010 by henriquefd]

[edit on 25-6-2010 by henriquefd]

The following is a translation from the original source,which is in portuguese:

The hard drives were sent to the United States at the beginning of year 2009, after a failed attempt from the technicians from the Instituto Nacional de Criminalistica(INC, or in english, National Criminalistics Institute).

During the aprehension of the hard drives, the chief of the operation, deputy Protogenes Queiiroz, classified the files as having "secrets from the republic", according to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

The brazilian government has no juridical means to order the company responsible for the encryption, or Daniel Dantas, to give away the access codes. The hard drives will remain on custody to the brazilian Federal Police, as the experts from the INC have hope on new information to arise from ongoing investigations, or either the invention of new technologies capable to cracking those encryptions.

Bank Opportunity said that the two softwares used for the encryption are avilable online and that one of them is a freeware. The other encryption system used (AES 256 bits) is one of the most sophisticated in the market today.

A technology inferior to that one, of 128 bits, is enough to create 3 x 10 to the 38th power number of combinations of passwords.

According to the bank's press release, Dantas affirmed, during the interrogations at the congress, that he was willing to give away the password to the files, to prove his innocense.

Ok, that is impressive. Even the FBI didn't manage to crack those files. So, my fellow conspiracy theorists. Does Daniel Dantas has the FBI in his pocket? I doubt it. Then, if we assume that the FBI can't crack an encryption like that, is there another agency that can? Maybe the NSA?

Are we safe if we encrypt our secrets using the same softwares used by Daniel Dantas?

I guess that's good news for those worried about the Big Brother. It seems we CAN hide our secrets if we want to. Or can we?

For those interested to know more about Daniel Dantas, here is a summary of the events:

In 2005, one politician became a whistleblower to one of the worst corruption schemes in the history of Brazil, involving no other than our present president's political party, PT(Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Labors Party, in english). Even Lula's name was involved, raising talks about impeachment on the opposition side. But you can't impeach a president with an astronomical support from his populace, so Lula's name was quickly removed from the accusations.

From that moment on, Lula worked to disassociate his name from his political party. His name was strong enough to survive and thrive on its own, although he did remain inside the PT.

Daniel Dantas's bank, Opportunity, was part of the corruption scheme, as the source from which money would get in the hands of more than 40 politicians accused of bribery, corruption, etc.

This was huge, with many ramifications, many big companies and big names involved. But, at the end, nobody gets arrested. That's what's frustrating.



noticias.terra.c om.br
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by henriquefd
Hi henriquefd, I remember when encryption programs were being released in the mid 90's. They were banned in the US so you couldn't download from there because the 128bit encryption could not be cracked. It was said(at the time) that all the computer power in the world today would take more than a life time to decrypt 128bit encryption, after a few years encryption became legal. This happen when the FBI owned 52bits of the 128bit encryption which made it possible to be decrypted. Now I guess there is a lot of these programs with no Bit controls.
The encryption here is 256 bits


Zelong.

reply to post by Zelong


FWIW, back in the mid 90s, an NSA wonk came out to Redstone and was talking in part about the recently defunct Clipper chip, which was to be required, legally, to be the only method of encrypting phone conversations, among other uses, because NSA wanted a backdoor.

Conversation lightly turned to the Clipper, and he said "At one time prime factoring encryption like RSA was a serious issue, but we are no longer concerned about it as of recently, so the loss of Clipper is not a problem at this point"

That hit the trade press at the time, and the guy never came and gave talks anymore. Make of it what you will.

they could have simply used a 2048 or even 4096 bits key with pgp, they would not be able to crack it. They would not even need to use pgp with a key size that large as it would take far to long to crack for even yes the FBI.

Making uncrackable encryption is quite easy, actually...

All you have to do is encrypt with a randomly generated one time pad... and nothing based on mathematics will be able to crack it.

en.wikipedia.org...



-Edrick