On Friday 27 June 2008, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > > Numbers don't lie. > > and this is why nobody uses brute force. > > There a better ways to crack keys. NSA has tons of experts in > mathematics and cryptoanalysis. Plus very sophisticated hardware. I > am sure for most ciphers they use something much more efficient than > stupid brute force.
Like what for example? Decent algorithms tend to have no known published weaknesses and their output is randomly distributed. Which brings us back to relying on stupid user input errors (Debian, anyone?) If anyone does know of weaknesses in the good algorithms, they are certainly not telling. I doubt anyone could ever keep that genie in a bottle for very long as it would be the mathematical coup of the millenium. So the reasonable real-world view of this to me is that not even the almighty NSA can crack it yet. I'm betting they still use good old-fashioned tried-and-proven social engineering and hosepipe techniques for their successes. -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
