Friday, June 5, 2020

Why should people worry about the existing encryption algorithms?

In WWII, German mathematicians claimed that the Enigma machine, based on simple substitution method, would require 100 years to solve. Alan Turing used less than 6 months built a Bombe at Bletchley Park. Bombe was able to crack 3,000 German encrypted message a day initially and later amounted to 2.5 million encrypted messages. 
Fig. Alan Turing's Bombe 

Today, those messages can be deciphered in a fraction of microseconds running a small program using the statistical analysis method. (The author has programmed one in Python.)

In 1977, RSA issued a challenge in an article "A new kind of cipher that would take millions of years to break". The so-called 40 quadrillion years problem (428 bit key) was solved in 1994 after a 6 months of work. 

RSA algorithm with key length 1024 bit to 4096 bit is considered strong and "unbreakable" today. Peter Shor @MIT proposed an algorithm that can solve such "unsolvable" programs on quantum computers. 

Imagine people store the encrypted data now and wait 10 years or so to decrypt when the powerful quantum computers are ready. Should you worry?

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