Cryptography Blogs/Documents

[Infatuas]

I wanted to share this with you all. It is was of the most educational documents I've found on cryptography/encryption.

My guess is many people are using TrueCrypt incorrectly. Even using a hidden volume doesn't establish plausible deniability as well as writing random data to a USB (for example) before encrypting. Then on top of that you would want to fragment the data on the drive after it is encrypted. There is a bit more too it, but this guy explains why and how they overcome encryption to eliminate plausible deniability as an escape route.

http://bitly.com/185k33n

[Mr-Protocol]

Interesting article, although I would poke some holes in it.

[Lost In Cyberia]

good stuff... some of it, is a tad bit over my head, I haven't sunk my teeth into crypto that deep, but it brings up a question. Why is AES only 128 bits strong? We use things like GPG, which uses 1024 and 2048 bit keys and higher, so why doesn't AES work with such high keys, and why is it so strong with just 128?

[Infatuas]

good stuff... some of it, is a tad bit over my head, I haven't sunk my teeth into crypto that deep, but it brings up a question. Why is AES only 128 bits strong? We use things like GPG, which uses 1024 and 2048 bit keys and higher, so why doesn't AES work with such high keys, and why is it so strong with just 128?

AES-128 is an encryption algorithm which would take somewhere around and roughly 1 billion billion years for a 10.5 tera flop super computer to crack as there would be (3.4 X 10^38 possible combinations). Technically half of that because you can average about 50% of attempts will eventually crack the password. Still a lot of time.

The bits in which you are referring too do not use AES it is RSA which is much different. RSA is decimal digits which greatly decrease the number of possible combinations. This would still take a while perhaps too long for someone to process in the applicable short time RSA keys are actually used.

Correct me if i'm wrong someone.

Edited July 10, 2013 by Infatuas

[Drei_Drachen]

good stuff... some of it, is a tad bit over my head, I haven't sunk my teeth into crypto that deep, but it brings up a question. Why is AES only 128 bits strong? We use things like GPG, which uses 1024 and 2048 bit keys and higher, so why doesn't AES work with such high keys, and why is it so strong with just 128?

http://forums.hak5.org/index.php?/topic/29492-how-secure-is-secure-128bit-vs-1024bit-webhosting-services/

^^ See the thread above. They talked about this topic a few months ago. the short version is that there is a difference between symmetric and asymmetric key sizes. Should help clear up why some algorithms use 128-bit or 256-bit and others use 1024 and 2048 (and higher B) ).

Edited July 13, 2013 by Drei_Drachen