Well they say that the so called " CIA " files are going to be released by Wikkileaks tomorrow ( 26th August ) although it appears that no-one will shed any light onto their possible contents. So it should be worth waiting for, or not, as the case may be !
I read an article by a leading cryptographer (who was basically showing as snake-oil someone's claim to have a usefully stronger algorithm with a 40kbit key). The important point here, talking about AES-256, is that it would take a Dyson sphere surrounding the sun, capturing all its energy, to power a computer to merely put a 187 bit counter through all its states without even doing the computations required in each state to do some brute forcing.
I suppose you could say that there is a limit based on the total amount of energy in the universe, and the remaining life of the universe... that would be the limit of brute forcing. On the other hand, if a technology is discovered that can bend time around on itself you could spend and infinite amount of time brute forcing the encryption... Course the other possibility is a fundamental change in the way the encryption is attacked. Not saying "use quantum computing" but use $currentlynotinventedmethodofcalculatingthings
anyhoo, the point is that as long as your encryption is good enough to prevent it being broken with the current level of technology it is sufficient. Cause by the time it can be decrypted the data will be worthless.
What's to stop it being cracked by someone early. If its only a pass phrase then all someone needs to do is run a bruit force cracking method on it 24-7 and maybe after a few months the pass key will be discovered.
It will be using 256-bit encryption, meaning there are 2^256 = 10^77 possible passphrases. It would take my Core i7 computer something like 10^70 seconds to crack the password by brute force.
Since the 1990s, Cray supercomputers have been built using Intel CPUs with bespoke motherboards that support 2048 CPUs or thereabouts. Even the CIA would need about 10^67 seconds, or 10^60 years, to crack a password of that size by brute force.
Edit:
10^77 passphrases, 10^70 seconds on a Core i7 CPU
A Core i7 performs about 10^10 operations per second across its four cores. My estimate implies that a single 256-bit key could be extracted and tested in 10^3 CPU cycles. If I could do that, I'd use the same technique to write a full-screen conversion of Quake for the ZX Spectrum.
Of course you can try brute forcing the passphrase on something like aes-256 but it's a slow process to do this if the passphrase has been chosen with even just a modicum of care and is sufficiently long. I suspect the Wikileaks people are sufficiently paranoid that they have chosen a very, very good passphrase that is not likely to be brute forced any time soon.
While I have no doubt that they have made it as safe as possible there is always the (very very very remote) chance that somebody could stumble across it by dumb luck.
While I have no doubt that they have made it as safe as possible there is always the (very very very remote) chance that somebody could stumble across it by dumb luck.
After all somebody wins the lottery eventually.
They'd have to be really, really very lucky, sort of like winning the lottery jackpot a few hundred times in a row lucky. You can count all the atoms in the universe in 256 bits.
The human mind is generally quite bad at exponential relationships, and "2^256" doesn't on the face of it, look that big. But we ought not forget the lesson in powers-of-two that a chess master once gave an emperor (I don't remember which emperor, but I'm sure he was from China or Japan). He asked the chess master what gift he would like in return for his teachings. The master replied, "I'd like one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next, four on the next - doubling, and so on". The emperor thought this would be a great deal, it couldn't possibly need that much rice.
So he started placing the grains of rice, starting with one on the first square, 2 on the next, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on. The inklings that there may be a problem dawned when the first row on the chessboard was filled - the 8th square needed 128 grains of rice, for a total now of 255 on the board. Then on the next row, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096...
By only the second row of the board, the last square needed 32768 grains of rice - now for a total of 65535. In only two squares more, the emperor realised he'd need to place 131072 grains of rice - and it was now apparent that just finishing the third row on the board (a grand total of 2^24-1 grains of rice on the board) alone would require about 2000 tonnes of rice, and *all* the rice in the entire empire would not be sufficient to even finish the fourth row of the chess board. And the chess board only gets you up to a total of 2^64-1 - a far, far cry from 2^256.
The end of that story, according to the legend, is that on realising the problem the Emporer had said egghead executed to stop him, and other people in future, taking the pee out of the Emporer. And it is a Chinese legend / folklore story.
It will be using 256-bit encryption, meaning there are 2^256 = 10^77 possible passphrases. It would take my Core i7 computer something like 10^70 seconds to crack the password by brute force.
Since the 1990s, Cray supercomputers have been built using Intel CPUs with bespoke motherboards that support 2048 CPUs or thereabouts. Even the CIA would need about 10^67 seconds, or 10^60 years, to crack a password of that size by brute force.
Edit:
A Core i7 performs about 10^10 operations per second across its four cores. My estimate implies that a single 256-bit key could be extracted and tested in 10^3 CPU cycles. If I could do that, I'd use the same technique to write a full-screen conversion of Quake for the ZX Spectrum.
Alright alright, I sold on the idea and have been since a few posts after that one I made. Your the third one now. :rolleyes: :)
The thing with these various brute force calculations above is that they are all flawed by assuming that you have to try every possible solution.
Assuming there are 100 possible answers.
You guess and blind chance is heavily against you. There are 99 wrong answers and just one correct one.
However your next guess is only up against 98 wrong answers..... until you reach a point where the odds are getting much more in your favour. When for example you have had a lot of guesses then your down to a 1 chance in 20 of getting the correct answer and eventually you never have to make the last guess because only one possibility exists and that is bound to be your next guess.
As you keep on guessing then your chances of getting the correct answer by chance increase and you would be really unlucky if you got to the point of one possibility left.
So although the chances of getting it right on the first guess are extremely bad they improve with every guess you make and therefore the total time will almost certainly be less than the times suggested above, in effect it will come down from billions of years to millions of years.
So although the chances of getting it right on the first guess are extremely bad they improve with every guess you make and therefore the total time will almost certainly be less than the times suggested above, in effect it will come down from billions of years to millions of years.
While your chances improve with each unique guess, just to make 2^128 guesses (which then gives you just a 2^128 chance of getting the right answer with each guess, at this stage - still incredibly long odds) will still require in energy terms the output of the entire sun for a considerable fraction of a year, in other words, by our puny energy output standards - a friggin' long time. 2^256 is a really very massive number.
You're better off using social engineering to try and discover the key, that'll be where the weakness lies. Chances are that many people already have the passphrase, and it just takes one of them to blab.
'Surely' they must have some decent evidence ? If youre going to accuse the guy who runs wikileaks and recently leaked a ton of information which angered a fair few countries then surely this evidence has to be decent for them to bring it to trial ?
Going to be interesting to see what happens, if (as i'm sure a lot of us think) hes been set up and its just a way to arrest this guy and get him out of the way then surely that will come to light. Stupid though as if this guys in jail someone else will just carry on his work
I like the bloke, hes younger than me and is 100% grey, i dont feel bad now about my grey one bit !
if this guy got stung by a bee it would be blamed on the CIA.
to say he must be innocent just becuase of what he does is a bit shortsighted, its kinda like saying a fmous pop star couldn't possibly be a kiddie fiddler.
Its meant to work as a form of intimidation to scare off any other potential Julian Assange's.
It sucks though, and smells off.
Yeah but these people will carry on whatever.
It does 'smell of it' but i dont know, still needs to be investigated. I dont think any of us know the facts behind it and are instantly assuming it must be a set up.
Bit like having a policeman in charge of catching paedophiles but theres been a very few cases where the copper is also involved and later gets arrested.
But unless you've seen all the evidence yourself your opinion is pretty biased.
Strange story this. No one here knows anything more and I do not think any details around the alleged crime has been released.
One thing that speaks against him is that he has hired a certain lawyer known to be among the best, but there is a saying "only the guilty ones ask for Silbersky" (the lawyer). He mostly defends real awful criminals in high profile cases.
One thing that speaks against him is that he has hired a certain lawyer known to be among the best, but there is a saying "only the guilty ones ask for Silbersky" (the lawyer). He mostly defends real awful criminals in high profile cases.
I have no doubt any case would be very high profile and according to the pentagon he has committed very serious crimes - I don't mean the alleged rape either.
Comments
This is supposed to be the document, it became active yesterday !
I suppose you could say that there is a limit based on the total amount of energy in the universe, and the remaining life of the universe... that would be the limit of brute forcing. On the other hand, if a technology is discovered that can bend time around on itself you could spend and infinite amount of time brute forcing the encryption... Course the other possibility is a fundamental change in the way the encryption is attacked. Not saying "use quantum computing" but use $currentlynotinventedmethodofcalculatingthings
anyhoo, the point is that as long as your encryption is good enough to prevent it being broken with the current level of technology it is sufficient. Cause by the time it can be decrypted the data will be worthless.
It will be using 256-bit encryption, meaning there are 2^256 = 10^77 possible passphrases. It would take my Core i7 computer something like 10^70 seconds to crack the password by brute force.
Since the 1990s, Cray supercomputers have been built using Intel CPUs with bespoke motherboards that support 2048 CPUs or thereabouts. Even the CIA would need about 10^67 seconds, or 10^60 years, to crack a password of that size by brute force.
Edit:
A Core i7 performs about 10^10 operations per second across its four cores. My estimate implies that a single 256-bit key could be extracted and tested in 10^3 CPU cycles. If I could do that, I'd use the same technique to write a full-screen conversion of Quake for the ZX Spectrum.
While I have no doubt that they have made it as safe as possible there is always the (very very very remote) chance that somebody could stumble across it by dumb luck.
After all somebody wins the lottery eventually.
They'd have to be really, really very lucky, sort of like winning the lottery jackpot a few hundred times in a row lucky. You can count all the atoms in the universe in 256 bits.
The human mind is generally quite bad at exponential relationships, and "2^256" doesn't on the face of it, look that big. But we ought not forget the lesson in powers-of-two that a chess master once gave an emperor (I don't remember which emperor, but I'm sure he was from China or Japan). He asked the chess master what gift he would like in return for his teachings. The master replied, "I'd like one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next, four on the next - doubling, and so on". The emperor thought this would be a great deal, it couldn't possibly need that much rice.
So he started placing the grains of rice, starting with one on the first square, 2 on the next, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on. The inklings that there may be a problem dawned when the first row on the chessboard was filled - the 8th square needed 128 grains of rice, for a total now of 255 on the board. Then on the next row, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096...
By only the second row of the board, the last square needed 32768 grains of rice - now for a total of 65535. In only two squares more, the emperor realised he'd need to place 131072 grains of rice - and it was now apparent that just finishing the third row on the board (a grand total of 2^24-1 grains of rice on the board) alone would require about 2000 tonnes of rice, and *all* the rice in the entire empire would not be sufficient to even finish the fourth row of the chess board. And the chess board only gets you up to a total of 2^64-1 - a far, far cry from 2^256.
Alright alright, I sold on the idea and have been since a few posts after that one I made. Your the third one now. :rolleyes: :)
Assuming there are 100 possible answers.
You guess and blind chance is heavily against you. There are 99 wrong answers and just one correct one.
However your next guess is only up against 98 wrong answers..... until you reach a point where the odds are getting much more in your favour. When for example you have had a lot of guesses then your down to a 1 chance in 20 of getting the correct answer and eventually you never have to make the last guess because only one possibility exists and that is bound to be your next guess.
As you keep on guessing then your chances of getting the correct answer by chance increase and you would be really unlucky if you got to the point of one possibility left.
So although the chances of getting it right on the first guess are extremely bad they improve with every guess you make and therefore the total time will almost certainly be less than the times suggested above, in effect it will come down from billions of years to millions of years.
While your chances improve with each unique guess, just to make 2^128 guesses (which then gives you just a 2^128 chance of getting the right answer with each guess, at this stage - still incredibly long odds) will still require in energy terms the output of the entire sun for a considerable fraction of a year, in other words, by our puny energy output standards - a friggin' long time. 2^256 is a really very massive number.
You're better off using social engineering to try and discover the key, that'll be where the weakness lies. Chances are that many people already have the passphrase, and it just takes one of them to blab.
Going to be interesting to see what happens, if (as i'm sure a lot of us think) hes been set up and its just a way to arrest this guy and get him out of the way then surely that will come to light. Stupid though as if this guys in jail someone else will just carry on his work
I like the bloke, hes younger than me and is 100% grey, i dont feel bad now about my grey one bit !
to say he must be innocent just becuase of what he does is a bit shortsighted, its kinda like saying a fmous pop star couldn't possibly be a kiddie fiddler.
Its meant to work as a form of intimidation to scare off any other potential Julian Assange's.
It sucks though, and smells off.
Yeah but these people will carry on whatever.
It does 'smell of it' but i dont know, still needs to be investigated. I dont think any of us know the facts behind it and are instantly assuming it must be a set up.
Bit like having a policeman in charge of catching paedophiles but theres been a very few cases where the copper is also involved and later gets arrested.
But unless you've seen all the evidence yourself your opinion is pretty biased.
Strange story this. No one here knows anything more and I do not think any details around the alleged crime has been released.
One thing that speaks against him is that he has hired a certain lawyer known to be among the best, but there is a saying "only the guilty ones ask for Silbersky" (the lawyer). He mostly defends real awful criminals in high profile cases.
I have no doubt any case would be very high profile and according to the pentagon he has committed very serious crimes - I don't mean the alleged rape either.