| 1 |
On Thursday 26 June 2008, Chris Walters wrote: |
| 2 |
> Sebastian Wiesner wrote: |
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
> | I don't and I did not say so, things like the Debian disaster bring |
| 5 |
> | you back to reality from dreams ... |
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
This is the favoured method of cracking encryption - misuse by the user. |
| 8 |
The canonical example is of course Enigma and the stupid mistake that |
| 9 |
let the Allies crack it. This is entirely analogous to the Debian |
| 10 |
fiasco. |
| 11 |
|
| 12 |
> With desktop computing power and speed growing at the rate that it |
| 13 |
> currently is, does it stretch the imagination so much that |
| 14 |
> supercomputer power and speed is also growing at a similar rate. |
| 15 |
> Even if an AES256 key cannot be broken "in a million years" by one |
| 16 |
> supercomputer (*I* would like to see a citation for that), there will |
| 17 |
> soon be a time when it will be able to be cracked in a much shorter |
| 18 |
> time - with one supercomputer. |
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
No-one has ever seriously said that it will take X time to crack a key. |
| 21 |
The possibility exists that the first key randomly selected in a brute |
| 22 |
force attack will match which gives you a time to crack in the |
| 23 |
millisecond range. |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
The calculation is quite simple - measure how quickly a specific |
| 26 |
computer can match keys. Divide this into the size of the keyspace. The |
| 27 |
average time to brute force a key is half that value. AFAIK this still |
| 28 |
averages out at enormous numbers of years, even at insane calculation |
| 29 |
rates like what RoadRunner can achieve. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
All this presupposes that the algorithm in question has no known |
| 32 |
cryptographic weaknesses so brute force is the only feasible method of |
| 33 |
attack currently. |
| 34 |
|
| 35 |
|
| 36 |
-- |
| 37 |
Alan McKinnon |
| 38 |
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
-- |
| 41 |
gentoo-user@l.g.o mailing list |
Archives