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Old May 16, 2010, 11:41 am
  #82  
AngryMiller
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
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Originally Posted by mre5765
Makes no difference.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...tack_on_a.html

We also expect that a careful analysis may reduce the complexities. As a preliminary result, we think that the complexity of the attack on AES-256 can be lowered from 2^119 to about 2^110.5 data and time.
Let's focus on time. Let's lower that to 2^110 for simplicity. Let's say with the plaintext the NSA can attempt one decryption operation in one nanosecond (one billionth of a second). Then to find the key takes:
2^110 / ( 10^9 * 3600 * 24 * 365.25 *10^15) = 41 quadrillion years.
Now let's say the NSA has spent $10 trillion to buy enough computers to build a massively parallel key cracker. Let's say each cracker costs just $10. So the NSA has one trillion computers to crack keys. So instead of
41 quadrillion years, the NSA takes a mere 41 thousand years.

And I've been extremely generous in my over estimation of the resources the NSA has. I suspect that it takes at least a microsecond, not a nanosecond, to try to decrypt some ciphertext and compare to the known plaintext. I suspect the NSA has spend closer to $100B on its key cracking hardware. And I suspect a key cracker node is closer to $100. So the number is likely closer to 41,000 * 1000 * 100 * 10, or 41 billion years to crack a key.

As I said, good luck with that.
Pretty good numbers. If your key phrase is short then that significantly reduces the time it would take to open the encrypted hard drive. Quite often that is the weakest link in encryption. A long phrase is hard to remember but strong. A short phrase is easy to remember but susceptible to brute force cracking. Picking up a foreign novel and taking the first letter of every page and using that as a key would make that pretty secure against brute force attacks.
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