While I haven't worked on LUKS, if you put aside using several millions of dollars in raw compute, the options are in order of likelihood: - recovering the key

While I haven't worked on LUKS, if you put aside using several millions of dollars in raw compute, the options are in order of likelihood: - recovering the key from a deleted file, ram, or other caches. - obtained key or bytes thereof by prior surveillance. (so many ways) - a forensics company could be sitting on a LUKS zero-day the way certain companies sit on Signal and iPhone vulns and use them on behalf of state actors. - exploited a deprecated version themselves with an implementation error. - prisoner had a short key because he used it so often - brute force using generated wordlists from surveillance and data transcripts. - trained a GPT model on all the books, music and online forum posts the prisoner had ever bought and used and produced a weighted wordlist. (I just made that one up.) - Happen to have "millions of dollars in gpu time" because they already had racks of seized mining rigs from other investigations so the main cost was electricity. Being an anarchist or secret police in France just seems like participation in their national traditions of riot sports, intrigue, and feats of mysterious intellectual prowess. There are so many unanswered questions in the story, I will wait for the Wes Anderson adaptation before thinking about it again.