surrendering one's passphrase to authorities

[Atom Smasher]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Robert J. Hansen wrote:

> Yes.  It's the same as the S2K in OpenPGP, last I checked -- which is 
> specifically designed to make brute forcers slow.
>
> Let's say the guy has a passphrase with 64 bits of entropy.  Assume you 
> have a massively distributed network and some truly cutting-edge math, 
> you could probably do it in two solid years of work.  The RC5 project on 
> distributed.net took 18 months to do 64 bits, but RC5 wasn't designed to 
> be very slow to rekey.
>
> Now consider just how many 64-bit keys the US government would like to 
> crack.  It probably numbers in the millions.
>
> Now consider how high this guy's passphrase stands in the to-do list.
==================

most people don't use pass-phrases that strong. in any case, we're talking 
about something that can realistically be broken in a reasonable amount of 
time (compared to several times the age of the universe) using real-world 
technology, not like trying to crack a messages that was intercepted on 
the wire, and encrypted with 4096 RSA or a 256bit twofish.


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