Anonymous group allegedly hacked Romney tax records via Franklin firm

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132. Let me explain this as simply as possible.

It will require some high school math, so pay attention.

First of all, thanks for providing that link because it just reenforces what I've been saying from the get go, which is that cracking AES256 is utterly impossible using current technology.

Now, if you had read your own article that you so thoughtfully provided, you'd see that the type of passwords they're cracking there are typically 8 characters with about 64 (6 bit) unique possible characters per slot. 8 characters might be on the low side for this hardware/software, so let's take the absolute most rosy scenario that this article provides and let's say that 16 character passwords are routinely cracked by this (it's not at all, but let's pretend). So, that would mean that in order to crack such a password, you'd need to go through around 64^16 (or 2^96) possible permutations. Now, that's a staggeringly high number indeed, but it's insanely, microscopically tiny compared to the amount of permutations required to crack an AES256 key. AES256 on the other hand has ~2^250 permutations required to crack. Do you know how much larger the second number is compared to the first? It's around a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times larger. That's a very big number, isn't it? To better illustrate this, take a look at the chart that you so kindly provided in your article:



This is what's called the "exponential wall of brute force cracking". Do you see how ungodly steep those curves are? Do you see how even using the Amazon EC2 with the combined power of 1000 powerful GPUs that after 8 characters the time involved becomes astronomically high? Now, you can only see a small fraction of the time curve because it becomes unwieldy very quickly. After 14 characters, you're talking years if not more, even using the EC2. After that, we're talking decades, centuries and millenia. AES256 encryption uses the equivalent of around 32 8-bit characters. Even assuming that these characters are words that are typically used, things like rainbow tables and massively parallel GPU computing would only make a tiny, tiny dent in the amount of time required to crack such a thing. You need to not only familiarize yourself with what's going on with the hardware and software here, but you really need to familiarize yourself with the scope of the numbers we're dealing with. AES256 is nothing like the toy-like encryption these websites use, NOTHING. Until you're able to even have the slightest grasp of the numbers we're dealing with, you're not going to understand why this is impossible. Now go on and explain to me how REAL modern technology is several trillion, trillion, trillion times more powerful than the article you provided says.