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Cryptogram: AES Broken?

Posted by chrisd on from the small-s-boxes-lead-to-weirdness dept.

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."

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. The end of privacy by bjelkeman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    on the golden age of privacy

    That is quite a funny statement. 99% of all email is being sent in clear text, often passing through gateways which have permanent wiretaps installed. Phone tapping is at an all time high in the west and there are cameras on nearly every street corner around where I live.

    Privacy.... I had a lot more privacy 20 years ago, that is for certain.

    --
    Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
  2. Re:Quantum Computing and Privacy by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Consider, for a moment, the social changes that would imediately take place if privacy were nonexistant, in the sense that all cryptography could be broken with a trivial effort by anyone and their brother, using off-the-shelf hardware

    How would this technology work against one-time pads? Besides, historically technologies have always tended to balance. Someone makes a better tank, then someone makes a better tank-killer, then the cycle repeats. If today's sophisticated encryption can in the future be defeated with cheap devices, then the crypto that this future society considers sophisticated would be well beyond ours. Consider the relative computational power of Bletchly Park and the sophistication of Engima of the early 40s and the power and sophistication of a 21st Century desktop PC.

    International politics would be forever changed.

    Not really. It would simply switch from broadcast and ciphers to the diplomatic bag and codes - which is how it worked for centuries. Complexity in international affairs is nothing new.

  3. Old data is the problem by BESTouff · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The problem is that old encrypted data doesn't "evolve" with the computing/crypto capacity.

    Imagine some black hat just archived all encrypted data he could get (bank transactions, private conversations, you name it) then decrypts them in 10 years when he can buy his brand new quantum computer. All this old data may prove very valuable for him.

    Perhaps very sensitive data shouldn't even transit on the net because you can't tell if it'll be decryptable in the future.