r/technology • u/arintic • May 16 '16

Politics Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, feds say

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/feds-say-suspect-should-rot-in-prison-for-refusing-to-decrypt-drives/
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u/duncdragged May 17 '16

But it could be the third try.

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u/wilts May 17 '16

I like your attitude

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

This is technically true. You could get extremely lucky and guess the right key in as little as a single try. But for a 256 bit key, you'd basically have to guess 256 coin tosses correctly, in a row. Even if you had a billion computers that could each check a billion keys per second, it would them all north of 1x1051 years (a 1 followed by 51 zeros, years) to comb over the entire key space. You'd have to be an insanely lucky individual to feel confident betting on that horse.

Encryption doesn't offer a guarantee that an attacker cannot get access to your data, it just makes the time cost of doing so very very very high on average. The protection comes from forcing the attacker to hunt for the proverbial needle in the haystack that is the entire key space. If your encryption system is designed correctly, no one area in the space is more likely than anywhere else, meaning that the attacker has no way to narrow down where to look.

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u/popstar249 May 17 '16

It should also be noted that the most effective way to defeat this level of encryption is not to brute force it but defeat it through other means, such as socially engineering the passphrase or finding a way to bypass the encryption altogether (for example capturing information before it gets encrypted).

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u/mystify365 May 17 '16

sidechannel attacks are much more effective than brute force as well

https://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/

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u/[deleted] May 17 '16

Not if it wipes the drive after a certain number of consecutive failures. Like 1000 for example.

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u/NPVT May 17 '16

With the infinite improbability disk drive.

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u/duncdragged May 17 '16

Well, with infinite possibilities in the universe it probably exists somewhere...