facebreak facebook brute force programming for dummies

The classic illustration of this exponential growth is the fable of the mathematician, the king, and the chess board: And of course, there are always 256-bit keys, if you worry about the possibility that government has a spare planet that they want to devote to key-cracking.Įach additonal bit doubles the number of keys you have to test in a brute force attack, so by the time you get to 128 or 256 bits, you have a staggeringly large number of potential keys to test. If you want to brute-force a key, it literally takes a planet-ful of computers. The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter. Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data. Burt Kaliski first came up with this characterization, and if he had a nickel for every time I tell it, he could buy a latte or three. It is very easy to underestimate the power of exponentials. We have argued for, designed, and built systems with 128 bits of security precisely because they are essentially unbreakable. Modern cryptographic systems are essentially unbreakable, particularly if an adversary is restricted to intercepts. In it, Jon describes the impossibility of brute force attacks on modern cryptography: Cory Doctorow recently linked to this fascinating email from Jon Callas, the CTO of PGP corporation.

Facebreak facebook brute force programming for dummies