Apparently the Snowden archives have been decrypted. Despite that the guy seemed to have a decent grasp on security I felt like this was a strong possibility. When he said "Assume your adversary is capable of trillion guesses per second" I was thinking he was probably low by factors of 1,000s at least depending on the algorithm...
Clearly the algorithm plays a big role in just how many guesses, but we are talking about nation states with virtually unlimited resources and the ability to produce massive compute clusters or ASICs for a single task like this.
But watching the doc where he is trying to explain to a reporter who doesn't even know how encryption works how to access and protect the files I assumed they would be the softest target because it would likely not continue to be properly secured if those who wanted it could get their hands on the devices or data.
But from the reporting it sounds like it was Snowden's copy that they obtained and have cracked it, revealing 1M docs. It sounds like it was just a single archive or disk encryption, making it a one shot deal from the sound of it... not individually salted files (ie: creating a complex algorithm based on meta data to create a hash plus a strong key mixed in).
Or, for all we know maybe they just beat the key out of him. I wish we knew more about the specifics on how it was encrypted and how it was decrypted since it would tell a lot about the realistic strength of certain encryption for the most sensitive data, assuming it wasn't "socially engineered" .
Clearly the algorithm plays a big role in just how many guesses, but we are talking about nation states with virtually unlimited resources and the ability to produce massive compute clusters or ASICs for a single task like this.
But watching the doc where he is trying to explain to a reporter who doesn't even know how encryption works how to access and protect the files I assumed they would be the softest target because it would likely not continue to be properly secured if those who wanted it could get their hands on the devices or data.
But from the reporting it sounds like it was Snowden's copy that they obtained and have cracked it, revealing 1M docs. It sounds like it was just a single archive or disk encryption, making it a one shot deal from the sound of it... not individually salted files (ie: creating a complex algorithm based on meta data to create a hash plus a strong key mixed in).
Or, for all we know maybe they just beat the key out of him. I wish we knew more about the specifics on how it was encrypted and how it was decrypted since it would tell a lot about the realistic strength of certain encryption for the most sensitive data, assuming it wasn't "socially engineered" .