WikiLeaks Crackers

[David Shaw]

On Apr 7, 2010, at 3:18 AM, Andre Amorim wrote:

> What type of encryption the WikiLeaks said to have broken? AES ?
> 
> Source:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/07wikileaks.html

Nobody who knows is talking, at least not yet.  This is early days for this particular story, so perhaps more will come out later.

Without any real information at this stage, it is hard to make useful statements on the subject.  For all we know, the original leaker who provided the data to WikiLeaks gave it to them in an encrypted zip file and the "break" was just running it through a password guesser for a few days or weeks.

I do not think that this is a break of any serious crypto, though.  If someone could arrange for AES or any other strong cipher to be broken simply by asking for it on a web site, this would be news.

David