Anonymous group allegedly hacked Romney tax records via Franklin firm

[bemildred]

143. I'm going to post this before I go read the story.

I can over here from Meta for the geek war.
I have degrees in Math (BA) and Computer Science (MS) and encryption was one of my hobbies.
I think you have the right of it, with the exception (theoretically) of 100%.
Anybody that does crypto professionally, feel free to correct me as needed.

The only theoretically uncrackable code is the one-time pad, last time I heard. All the mathematical encryption methods are all based on computations that are "easy" with the key (one or more of the terms of the computation) and infeasible without it. "Infeasible" means theoretically possible with known and usually "easy" algorithms, but of very high computational order, i.e. you will never finish unless the problem is very small. The usual thing is based on factorization of very large composite integers.

AES is considered "weak" and is out of fashion, though I quite agree it is good enough for most purposes, and yet I would not bet on it being invulnerable to the spooks. But the various free encryption packages out there now I would expect could be made good enough even for that, I don't know that, but that is how I would bet.

In ALL of the mathematical methods, it is EASY to make the problem bigger, if AES256 is cracked, you can go to AES512 or AES1024 and so on, so while it is theoretically feasible to crack these methods (not 100% uncrackable) it is also theoreticaly very easy to make the problem much much harder when that happens, if you care to.

There are about a gazillion encryption methods out there now, it's a very active field.

Edit: nothing more to add.