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Cryptogram: AES Broken?
bcrowell writes "The latest CryptoGram reports
that AES (Rijndael) and Serpent may have been broken. The good news is that when cryptographers say 'broken' they don't necessarily mean broken in a way that is practical to exploit right now. Still, maybe we need to assume that any given type of crypto is only temporary. All of cryptography depends on a small number of problems that are believed to be hard. And all bets are definitely off when quantum computers arrive on the scene. Maybe someday we'll look back fondly on the golden age of privacy."
Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography are unrelated technologoies. Quantum crypto is indeed "unbreakable", but requires a single physical channel connecting source and destination. It will not carry over routers and absolutely cannot be used for normal internet email for instance.
Quantum computing would break a range of encryption techniques, especially most public-key techniques, but nothing known today rules out new and more robust digital encryption technologies being developed that Quantum Computers could not break, and I imagine plenty of people are working on them.
It's probably worth noting that IBM has already demonstrated a quantum computer running a factoring algorithm:
(See here)
Umm... you might be a little confused as to how AES was selected. AES selection criteria were public, as were discussions on the strengths (and weaknesses) of finalist algorithms. In addition, I know two of the AES conference program committee personally, and believe that had the NSA attempted any shinanigans, they would have been resisted and/or reported loudly.
These knee-jerk reactions to the NSA being evil really are counter-productive. Of course there are evil people in the US Government; there are evil people in every walk of life. I just don't think there are enough evil people in the NSA to conspire against the "good" people in the NSA.
You might be too young to remember, but back in the 70's there was a big commotion about the NSA modifying IBM's original S-Boxes. Many people at that time claimed very loudly that the NSA was inserting a back door into the algorithm. The NSA was pretty tight-lipped about why they made these changes; I think they still are, BTW. As it turns out, the original IBM S-Boxes were more succeptable to differential cryptanalysis than the ones the NSA reccomended for use with DES.
Remember that the NSA has a dual mandate. First, it is supposed to intercept, decode, and/or decrypt foreign elint intercepts. This is one of the reasons why they're one of the largest employers of foreign language specialists. Second, they are supposed to develop technologies to protect US national interests. The two missions sometimes conflict, but ever since Herb Lin at the National Academy of Sciences published his report on why it is in the US' national interest to allow widespread use of strong crypto for domestic applications, most (if not all) of the NSA types I've encountered have supported the development and use of strong crypto.
Of course, there are federal groups that like to sneak into people's homes and install keyboard sniffers. But, if that is going to be your law-enforcement surveilance technique of choice, why bother forcing bad crypto on the populous?
I'm a Ph.D student at Harvard. I've done cryptography research in the past. So listen up people.
As for public key cryptography, most but not all public key cryptosystems are completely broken by quantum computers. Luckily we still have some public key cryptosystems that have not yet been broken using quantum algorithms. Elliptic curve discrete log is one such example.