Anonymous group allegedly hacked Romney tax records via Franklin firm

[sir pball]

139. For sufficiently large values of "time"..

AES *has* been "broken"...but "[f]or cryptographers, a cryptographic "break" is anything faster than a brute force—performing one trial decryption for each key (see Cryptanalysis)." - teh wikiz

The best known attack against the weakest version of standard-compliant 128-bit AES (there are faster attacks, but they're against ciphers with below-specified rounds) has a computational complexity of 2^126.1 (1) - using 100% of the capacity of the world's fastest supercomputer, at a ridiculously optimistic 1000 operations per check, would take 3.6 TRILLION years. Just for poops and giggles, the best AES-256 (which AFAIK is pretty much the only version utilities use anymore) attack is 2^254.4, for a runtime of....wait for it...37.6 billion trillion years!

Incidentally, those numbers are what makes me kind of think this might NOT be a hoax - the public at large would believe that records can be "hacked" off of the IRS or PwC's systems, but I'd wager a year's pay all that data is quite well encrypted; barring a leak of the keys, there's zero chance of getting the data off the servers. Physical access to paper records is far far more plausible in the real world.