TheSpecialist
Banned
*OFF TOPIC* PUSHING THE LIMIT, HUH! I have been observing AO for a couple of months and been aware of rules and such. TheSpecialist is the guy who was banned before and came back and now, banned again, and maybe he’ll come back again. Some people also reincarnated but not that obvious.

Well, as far as encryption is concerned,
How easy would it be to crack a 128 bit encryption?
Just like most of the members told, IT_IS_JUST_A_MATTER_OF_TIME. How much, computationally, it will depend on many things, BOXES used, encryption strength, etc. etc. (Sorry for repeating what others had already told).

On the other hand, I want to ask something, there are companies, for example, one company allowing me to encrypt my HTML sources who, explicitly mentioned that if ever I had deleted my ORIGINAL (non-encrypted) HTML source, I could contact them and ‘maybe’ they could retrieve the ORIGINAL from the ENCRYPTED COPY. I am just wondering, maybe the ENCRYPTION could be reversed by the creator of the ENCRYPTION software by reversing the formula in which had been used to ENCRYPT something in the first place. Just a thought that everything about it is MATHEMATICALLY computed; therefore the formula can be reversed.

From PGP, I had read their intro to Encryption and it is a good read.
Strong cryptography

“There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files. This book is about the latter.”

- Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C
PGP is also about the latter sort of cryptography.

Cryptography can be strong or weak, as explained above. Cryptographic strength is measured in the time and resources it would require to recover the plaintext. The result of strong cryptography is ciphertext that is very difficult to decipher without possession of the appropriate decoding tool. How difficult?

Given all of today’s computing power and available time—even a billion computers doing a billion checks a second—it is not possible to decipher the result of strong cryptography before the end of the universe.

One would think, then, that strong cryptography would hold up rather well against even an extremely determined cryptanalyst. Who’s really to say? No one has proven that the strongest encryption obtainable today will hold up under tomorrow’s computing power. However, the strong cryptography employed by PGP is the best available today. Vigilance and conservatism will protect you better, however, than claims of impenetrability.

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Larger keys will be cryptographically secure for a longer period of time. If what you want to encrypt needs to be hidden for many years, you might want to use a very large key. Of course, who knows how long it will take to determine your key using tomorrow’s faster, more efficient computers? There was a time when a 56-bit symmetric key was considered extremely safe.

Current thinking is that 128-bit keys will be safe indefinitely, at least until someone invents a usable quantum computer. We also believe that 256-bit keys will be safe indefinitely, even if someone invents a quantum computer.

This is why the AES includes options for 128 and 256-bit keys. But history tells is that it’s quite possible someone will think this statement amusingly quaint in a few decades.
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A read from PGP’s IntroToCrypto.pdf
Like most of us think, it is just a matter of TIME.

-GONE