6 ms·
I guess we can just assume that one day all our encrypted communications and records will be deciphered by future historians.
by dcow 5y ago
I guess we can just assume that one day all our encrypted communications and records will be deciphered by future historians.
- formerly_proven 5y agoFWIW symmetric encryption has been really solid for a long time. DES, pretty much the first strong civilian encryption algorithm, is crackable due to brute-forcing the 56-bit key space, which has been pointed out as a security problem almost 50 years ago, but in terms of cryptanalysis it's doing ok. AES will turn 25 soon and the best cryptanalyses today are like a factor four faster than brute-force (but require rather significant memory, which brute force doesn't), which is basically nothing.
- k__ 5y agoThis could get a bit awkward for the people who freeze themselves.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoMight be a long time though right? > On average, to brute-force attack AES-256, one would need to try 2^255 keys. (This is the total size of the key space divided by 2, because on average, you'll find the answer after searching half the key space.) So the time taken to perform this attack, measured in years, is simply 2^255 / 2,117.8 trillion > Expressed as an exponent of 10, that’s 2.73 * 1061. Written in full format: >27,337,893,038, 406,611, 194,430,009, 974,922,940, 323,611,067, 429,756,962, 487,493,203 years. >In English: 27 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. From-https://scrambox.com/article/brute-force-aes/ https://scrambox.com/article/brute-force-aes/ I’d love to hear Hacker News opinions on how long that will be valid due to faster computers, quantum computing etc. Or if it will always pretty much be valid in your opinion? The number they get for all the PCs on earth trying it is still 13,689 trillion trillion trillion trillion years. The universe is only 14 billion years old and estimates of what the universe will be like in even a trillion years are more like science fiction than science because it is so wildly long.
- moralestapia 5y agoIf you asked someone in the 50s how long until you could have 1TB of data in a chip the size of a fingernail (also cheap), it would've probably laughed and said "in a million years". Yet, here we are now ...
- iratewizard 5y agoI went back to 1959 to ask Gordon Moore. He wasn't too far off on his guess. I do hope he heeds my advice and invests in bitcoin.
- CGamesPlay 5y agoThat article doesn’t talk about GPU decryption at all, which is many multitudes faster, and also it’s only talking about finding a specific AES key. It may be possible to search for multiple keys in parallel in the future, which could cut this figure down by the corresponding amount (if the goal is just to find some keys, and not specific ones).
- bnegreve 5y agoYes, they can be a hundred times faster so now it's only 273,378,930,384,066,111,944,300,099,749,229,403,236,110,674,297,569,624,874,932 years. More seriously, GPUs are faster because they are highly parallel, and parallelism can only give you a speedup that is linear with the number of processing units. So unless you're planning to build a GPU with trillions units, that won't help much.
- mhh__ 5y agoThe VENONA project also indicates that far less than complete decryption is required for devastating results.
- Talanes 5y agoMC Frontalot did a song about exactly that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUPstXCqyus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUPstXCqyus
- _8j50 5y agoIf you ignore technological breakthroughs
- lm28469 5y agoLikely, but unless you're Marie Antoinette nobody will ever bother reading them