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."

Comments

What Schneier really meant to say...

[BigBadBri]

Serpent and Rijndael are vulnerable to this attack - it seems Twofish isn't - damn government should have chosen Twofish for AES instead...

Seriously, though - any approach that manages to reduce the difficulty of cracking these algorithms by a factor of 2^100 is impressive, and Schneier at least simplifies it enough that us folks with very rusty number theory can appreciate the achievement.

His comment later in Cryptogram about his name appearing on a list of banned words is much, much scarier - looks like he's upset someone in the content censorship Gestapo. That same content filter would deny access to today's Slashdot front page - nasty.