Originally Posted by
armandov9
"We have a laptop at the office that we share when we go on business trips. I don't have access to other people's windows logins. I can only log on to mine. So all of the files in there under other people's login will not be accessible, nor can I make them accessible. The computer can be seized, then if I don't provide passwords and it can be seen there are other login accounts?"
You didn't state what OS you had on the laptop but, assuming it was Windows XP or Vista, you probably don't have an administrator account on the laptop. Someone at your office does, however, and that person has access to ALL files of ALL accounts(either by default or by configuration). They also have access to the Computer Management snap-in(Local Users and Groups) for Administrative Tools. That person can also see all accounts by using the command line. Click Start, then Run, type in lusrmgr.msc in the Open field and click OK. The administrator of that laptop, if he/she has configured it for restrictive access, will have these features locked out so a user cannot access them or modify any settings already made.
Originally Posted by
Superguy
"Chances are if they can break it, someone else can. They're paranoid enough that if it can be broken in a reasonable amount of time, published or not, it won't be used to protect TS data.
AES is expected to protect TS until at least 2030 with the 256 bit implementation. If you want to tell if AES is getting closer to being broken sooner for start looking for NIST competitions sooner than that and for NSA's Suite B to be updated before then."
When I was in school in 2005, there was speculation out there that NSA had already broken AES prior to its implementation as the de facto standard for encryption. Whether or not that is true, we will never know. They certainly would not publish the fact if it were true, for obvious reasons. Look to history and you will see that countries that broke the codes of other countries took great pains to keep it a secret for as long as possible.