AES encryption is cracked

Originally posted by JennaDarling

Originally posted by BIGPoJo

Originally posted by _BoneZ_
reply to post by miniatus

 

My AES256 encryption password is a 63-character random ASCII. It was said that it would take billions of years to try to crack that kind of a password. Good luck.

You don't actually believe that do you? The only form of encryption that cannot be broken is hardware driven bulk encryption.

You mean like Seagate HARDWARE AES encrypted 2.5" momentus drives?

No, I mean like military encryption devices.

Originally posted by BIGPoJo
You don't actually believe that do you?

No, not really. But even a fraction of that time could be many life times of hacking before my password is cracked, so I'm not too terribly worried at this point.

Pgp was the internet coding that the government tried to stop.
Once we got that other codes sought to be used on the internet.

reply to post by Maxmars


Thanks for the laugh. AES encryption is NOT cracked. Read the article and do some research before posting nonsense.

Also, people claiming CISCO or whoever put back doors in their systems do not understand what it means to "crack" a cryptosystem. An encryption standard is independent of the hardware or software that implements it. You cannot find a flaw in a given implementation and say you have "cracked" the cryptosystem itself. That's like saying that if you develop dementia so that you can't count any more that no one in the world can rely on numbers any more.

Originally posted by XtraTL
reply to post by Maxmars

 

Thanks for the laugh. AES encryption is NOT cracked. Read the article and do some research before posting nonsense. .....

Well, that's two in one day for me... please.. educate me. In what way do you care to define 'cracked' and explain the attitude you should have checked at the door..... It should be aggrandizing for you, and further the knowledge of all ATS members....

P.S. I am assuming you are asking me to reread the OP article entitled "AES encryption is cracked," correct?

reply to post by miniatus


Ah.. sorry i didn't see that.

Yeah this article is crap, it doesn't say anything about them even cracking AES, it pretty much says what we already know.

I am sad, i figured it was true, so i could finally open that damn insurance file...

Originally posted by doom27
Yeah this article is crap, it doesn't say anything about them even cracking AES, it pretty much says what we already know.

I am sad, i figured it was true, so i could finally open that damn insurance file...

Perhaps your disappointment (and that of others) is about the idea that you expected a 'cracked' encryption system to mean that you can now push a button on anything so-encrypted and see what's inside. That is NOT what this is about.

Encryption systems are all presupposed to be 'crackable' with the strength of the system measured in the number of permutations and time it would take to 'solve' the scrambled and disguised content. AES was so complex in that regard that people took to the simplistic view of it being 'practically' impossible to decipher messages which underwent this kind of encryption.

Two fallacies at play here....

1 - that computing power never increases
2 - that people cannot develop new algorithms which out perform any known at the time the encryption system was developed.

What didn't they have or know when AES was almost universally adopted?

Parallel processing, migration from megaflops to gigaflops to teraflops to petaflops, developments in number theory, as well as the advent of quantum analysis.....

If you were looking for a 'crack' in the sense of a computer game or software app... you missed the point.

Knowing that this encryption system has lost it's security 4-fold tells me that in time, and probably not much, it will no longer be safe to use. By then such contemporary matters such as the Wikileaks "big" file, will likely have long past, and frankly, I strongly suspect the government has always known what was in there.

reply to post by Maxmars


I was under the impression that aes256 is the highest legal encrytpion for civilian use, and that there was 512 bit encryption for select organizations? Then again i may have read this on rense.

We have to keep in mind that as computing power keeps increasing exponentially, we can afford the processing for stronger encryption methods as well.

That is until quantum computers become a working reality outside of university prototypes.

reply to post by VonDoomen


I can never attest to the capabilities of our 'cutting edge' developments within the military industrial complex.... frankly, I think we weren't meant to know.

I've pretty much given up on desktop computer security. No idea what the big letter agencies use for back doors, but the street hackers get a lot of information "from the trash can". Disk cache that gets continually written back to the disk unencrypted. That will usually be the interesting stuff you were just looking at on your screen. You have to remember that magnetic disk operations are very sloppy. Even overwriting an area on your hard disk 8 times will not completely erase the underlying data.

No doubt there is some turnkey reader that you simply connect via 80 pin and it walks the read heads over the hard drive collecting and time stamping that information.

reply to post by Maxmars



Not really, you act like i'm trying to attack you, i'm not. I was hoping on something found on the algorithm of the encryption, this is what i do for a living, and this article really gave no information we haven't already known, it basically states some guys have stated they made some breakthroughs on cracking the algorithm, but provide no evidence.

reply to post by doom27


Sorry if it seemed a bit defensive, it was not directed at you, but that's no excuse.

I figure they'd not report on the math behind the algorithm if they haven't published their work yet... I agree this is not the best source for in depth analysis, but I found it mentioned no where else (for the moment.)

Presumably what they managed to do was eliminate certain steps in the decryption process, thus making it less 'demanding' in regards to time and iterations of processing. I believe that more technical treatment of the subject will be forthcoming.

reply to post by Maxmars


Enter Quantum Encryption.

This would be a great time to invest in quantum encryption schemes.

Originally posted by John_Rodger_Cornman
reply to post by Maxmars

 

Enter Quantum Encryption.

This would be a great time to invest in quantum encryption schemes.

I think you're right. As far as I know, we're not "there" yet... so this would be the 'ground floor' opportunity for those able to seize it.

"Perhaps your disappointment (and that of others) is about the idea that you expected a 'cracked' encryption system to mean that you can now push a button on anything so-encrypted and see what's inside. That is NOT what this is about."

This is simply not a crack, this is a weakness in AES keystrength.

"If you were looking for a 'crack' in the sense of a computer game or software app... you missed the point."

You are clearly not a security person.

"Knowing that this encryption system has lost it's security 4-fold tells me that in time, and probably not much, it will no longer be safe to use."

You really need to brush up on the math in question. Losing two bits is really not a big deal

Z

I'm pretty sure that AES was cracked months ago. I haven't read the article, but this is news that I heard quite some time ago already.

Originally posted by XtraTL
reply to post by Maxmars

 

Thanks for the laugh. AES encryption is NOT cracked. Read the article and do some research before posting nonsense.

Also, people claiming CISCO or whoever put back doors in their systems do not understand what it means to "crack" a cryptosystem. An encryption standard is independent of the hardware or software that implements it. You cannot find a flaw in a given implementation and say you have "cracked" the cryptosystem itself. That's like saying that if you develop dementia so that you can't count any more that no one in the world can rely on numbers any more.

I understand exactly what it means to crack encryption, I was merely pointing out that Cisco code backdoors into their IOS's in reply to something the OP mentioned about government backdoors.

I bet Them have had this for years.
i bet a new one will pop up!
and it will be unbreakable.
and Them have the Key to it.

Originally posted by JennaDarling
Truecrypt.org

use it, do all your HD's too.

Very good program, be grateful for it.

Why? Most people don't have anything so sensitive that they need to encrypt all their drives.

And the AES attack only reduces the searchspace a little, it would still take ages to bruteforce a random key.