128 bit security/ kindly explain plz

[Phoenix21]

hello guys!
i have started working on security lately and i wanted to know exactly how this 64,128 bit encryption goes? How it is achieved and in what way the bit level is increased? Kindly help me out u gurus!!

[Guus]

You can find lots of information on the distributed.net website - Distributed hosts several projects where you can contribute your computer processing power to help brute-force cracking codes (much like UD.com and Seti@home).

On distributed.net, select one of the several projects. On most project information sheet are several links to other sites that contain information on the alghorithems used. Hope this helps.

[Phoenix21]

thnks man!

[Jabberwocky]

the number of bits is the number of possible keys that the encryption meathod can have. for example, the data encryption standard (des) that was approved in the late 70's as the federal standarded for unclassified documents, used 56 bit keys, which means a cryptanalyst without the key has to try all the combinations of 56 1's and 0's, which is more then a quadrillion possible keys. on average you have to try around half of the possiblities to be successful. it was kept as the standard until 1999. now it's safer to use double- and triple des, which uses 2 or 3 des keys respectivly. each time you add a a single bit you double the number of keys. 57 bits is twice as large as 56, and so on. theoretically it's safer to have a bigger key, but there are some known attacks on double and triple des....

send me a pm if you're still interested in encryption algorithms, a lot of them are open source and i could send you some if you'd like to take a look at the innerds of some popular ones.

[dieterle81]

here is another good link to get more knowledge about cryptography

http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/sections.html

cheers,

[Phoenix21]

thanks jabberwocky and dieterle81 i will try out the given address and i will pm u too jabberwocky

[echelon3]

These days the US government uses BlowFish Encryption which I think is 448 bit.

[Ghost_25inf]

blowfish wasnt that a movie? lol

[ac1dsp3ctrum]

The 128bit SSL encryption is how much the browser will 'encrypt' the information on a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connection.... For example my Administrator certificate has a 1024 bit RSA key, which IMHO will be pretty hard to brute force... 128bit encryption is under-rated, most people think that its easy to crack.... It isnt, 128bit encryption would take a while to crack... I mean it takes a good system about 20hrs to crack a 48bit DES key.... I would think it should take at least 3 days to crack a 128 bit key.. If im wrong, correct me, dont flame me

[thesecretfire]

*flames acidspectrum*
The scale is logarithmic, so lot me do some calcs here...
48 bit is 281474976710656 possibilities, so over 20 hours, thats about 14073748835533 attempts per hour...
128 bit is about 3.4x10^38 possibilities, which translates into about 2.417x10^26 hours, which is 2760104611 trillion years.