3 ms·

Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce t

by maika 16y ago

Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?

mishmash 16y ago
Oh good point. Would it then be 95 printable ASCII characters by 32 (for the effective key size in bytes)? If so, that gives a laughably large number: 1937114844585011541643853683619338993862294591963291168212890625 Another question, and I'm way over my head here (also time for bed), but considering this snippet below, is it possible the NSA or another group would have an undiscovered attack against it? "NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[11][12] In late 2009 NSA declassified information stating that NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key.[13]" Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
- gwern 16y ago
  I don't think it matters whether the NSA can decrypt it. The 'insurance' is a contingency for releasing information to the general public and mainstream media; there is almost surely nothing of value in it as a weapon against Wikileaks. Any organization or group which will decrypt it but not release it doesn't count. Random bloggers or citizens, on the other hand, might release it if they decrypted it - but this seems secure against them.
  - mishmash 16y ago
    No doubt, I'm sure there's something quite damaging to war effort or administration in that archive. My interest in the NSA angle was only due to the technical side.

by maika 16y ago

Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?

mishmash 16y ago

Oh good point. Would it then be 95 printable ASCII characters by 32 (for the effective key size in bytes)? If so, that gives a laughably large number: 1937114844585011541643853683619338993862294591963291168212890625 Another question, and I'm way over my head here (also time for bed), but considering this snippet below, is it possible the NSA or another group would have an undiscovered attack against it? "NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[11][12] In late 2009 NSA declassified information stating that NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key.[13]" Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

gwern 16y ago
I don't think it matters whether the NSA can decrypt it. The 'insurance' is a contingency for releasing information to the general public and mainstream media; there is almost surely nothing of value in it as a weapon against Wikileaks. Any organization or group which will decrypt it but not release it doesn't count. Random bloggers or citizens, on the other hand, might release it if they decrypted it - but this seems secure against them.
- mishmash 16y ago
  No doubt, I'm sure there's something quite damaging to war effort or administration in that archive. My interest in the NSA angle was only due to the technical side.