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The text is reproduced below.

AOAKN HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC

RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX

PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH

NLXKG NENKK ONOIB AKEEQ

UAGTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH

LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ

KLDTS GQIRU AOAKN 27 1525/6.

NURP 40TW 194

NURP 37DK 76

I say someone go try some ciphers.

RSA-260 = 4397328654844826923795068102505872571721883526553349659561256924505973939597
          593482272505698004801207988043088656411102133523080581
        × 5028695206842569864686141618253083416610081090075366674776775706538324961364
          412200138116378509733307971876652984898985905923678379

https://x.com/penlume/status/2095372672356212876

A truly random number in any n-bit keyspace, can have any value from 0 to (2^n)-1, no?

So how is 4 any less secure than 43345959872354790? Granted it *looks* trivial, but surely it's just as valid as any other number in the range?

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies, folks. I was looking at this from a purely theoretical probability PoV, ignoring the fact that, in this field, entropy is just as necessary as randomness, and that weak keys will always tend to be at the low end of the space and thus more easily found by brute force atacks.

I'm aware that the whole "The British cracked engima" is a fundamentally flawed statement as the poles did it first. But what i'm curious on is was Alan Turings machine basically an early version of a "Brute force attack" or given the fact it had some parameters does that make it not a brute force attack?

Also whenever i've asked "How did it break engima?" i don't seem to get a straight answer, even the movie Imitation Game doesn't quite give me the answer i'm looking for, i struggle to fully understand how it exactly did what it did. I understand kinda of but not enough where i'd feel confident informing others who were also curious

A US physicist and a Canadian computer scientist have won this year's Turing Award for their invention of a form of seemingly unbreakable encryption.

Charles H Bennett and Gilles Brassard's work, which dates back to 1984, is known as quantum cryptography and has "redefined secure communication and computing", the award's body said.

Scientists believe their work will be central to electronic communications in a world that depends heavily on data-sharing, but which for years has been trying to develop more powerful quantum computers.

The Turing Award, named after the mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, is known as the "Nobel Prize of computing". It comes with a $1m (£800,000) prize.

Bennett, 82, is a fellow at technology company IBM in New York, while Brassard, 70, is a professor at the University of Montreal. The pair met by chance whilst attending an academic conference in Puerto Rico in 1979.

Bennett is reported to have approached the computer scientist during a break to suggest the idea of developing a banknote that could never be forged.

It heralded decades of co-operation, during which the two men developed a technique based on quantum physics - the behaviour of particles of matter, including electrons and photons.

March 18, 2026

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7474004g01o

How true do you think this is?

I’ve noticed there is not a general consensus among images listing the strength of different password lengths. I’ve included two images, one shows at 18 characters, a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters the time to crack is one (1) quintillion years, the second image lists the same length (18) as taking 94 quintillion years. Which is correct? Also, other lesser lengths show differing times to crack.

Follow up question, how long would a similar 30 character pw take to crack? And 40 character pw?

Thanks!

February 2028

You would think this goes without saying, but given the recent rise in BTC value, this sub is seeing an uptick of posts about the security of SHA-256.

Let's start with the obvious: SHA-2 was designed by the National Security Agency in 2001. This probably isn't a great way to introduce a cryptographic primitive, especially give the history of Dual_EC_DRBG, but the NSA isn't all evil. Before AES, we had DES, which was based on the Lucifer cipher by Horst Feistel, and submitted by IBM. IBM's S-box was changed by the NSA, which of course raised eyebrows about whether or not the algorithm had been backdoored. However, in 1990 it was discovered that the S-box the NSA submitted for DES was more resistant to differential cryptanalysis than the one submitted by IBM. In other words, the NSA strengthed DES, despite the 56-bit key size.

However, unlike SHA-2, before Dual_EC_DRBG was even published in 2004, cryptographers voiced their concerns about what seemed like an obvious backdoor. Elliptic curve cryptography at this time was well-understood, so when the algorithm was analyzed, some choices made in its design seemed suspect. Bruce Schneier wrote on this topic for Wired in November 2007. When Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents in 2013, the exact parameters that cryptographers suspected were a backdoor was confirmed.

So where does that leave SHA-2? On the one hand, the NSA strengthened DES for the greater public good. On the other, they created a backdoored random number generator. Since SHA-2 was published 23 years ago, we have had a significant amount of analysis on its design. Here's a short list (if you know of more, please let me know and I'll add it):

• New Collision Attacks Against Up To 24-step SHA-2 (2008)

• Preimages for step-reduced SHA-2 (2009)

• Advanced meet-in-the-middle preimage attacks (2010)

• Higher-Order Differential Attack on Reduced SHA-256 (2011)

• Bicliques for Preimages: Attacks on Skein-512 and the SHA-2 family (2011)

• Improving Local Collisions: New Attacks on Reduced SHA-256 (2013)

• Branching Heuristics in Differential Collision Search with Applications to SHA-512 (2014)

• Analysis of SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 (2016)

• New Records in Collision Attacks on SHA-2 (2023)

If this is too much to read or understand, here's a summary of the currently best cryptanalytic attacks on SHA-2: preimage resistance breaks 52 out of 64 rounds for SHA-256 and 57 out of 80 rounds for SHA-512 and pseudo-collision attack breaks 46 out of 64 rounds for SHA-256. What does this mean? That all attacks are currently of theoretical interest only and do not break the practical use of SHA-2.

In other words, SHA-2 is not broken.

We should also talk about the size of SHA-256. A SHA-256 hash is 256 bits in length, meaning it's one of 2²⁵⁶ possibilities. How large is that number? Bruce Schneier wrote it best. I won't hash over that article here, but his summary is worth mentoning:

brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.

However, I don't need to do an exhaustive search when looking for collisions. Thanks to the Birthday Problem, I only need to search roughly √(2²⁵⁶) = 2¹²⁸ hashes for my odds to reach 50%. Surely searching 2¹²⁸ hashes is practical, right? Nope. We know what current distributed brute force rates look like. Bitcoin mining is arguably the largest distributed brute force computing project in the world, hashing roughly 2⁹⁴ SHA-256 hashes annually. How long will it take the Bitcoin mining network before their odds reach 50% of finding a collision? 2¹²⁸ hashes / 2⁹⁴ hashes per year = 2³⁴ years or 17 billion years. Even brute forcing SHA-256 collisions is out of reach.

I'm one week into my introduction to cryptography class and we just wrapped up the one-time pad. It's wild to me that the most secure encryption scheme in existence is mathematically so simple.

How is it that a basic XOR operation can be "perfectly secret" to the point where an attacker is literally stuck at a 50/50 guess, even with infinite computing power?

It really makes me wonder why we don't just use it for everything. Of course, I know that’s not the case or else there wouldn't be a whole field and all this complex modern math to learn, but it just makes me so curious and eager to see where the rest of the semester goes.

KVNGR REV ALPHA PPS VT PIZ UHMYLPVOQ CM XHWMZP. NBJB SPI'F BYQS QT D'Y BYFGEOB FI VQDYL MAQ. -NGQHT 5120- Nuclear winter has come

Thank all of you guys here it has now been solved "THE INSTITUTE IS SEALED. THEY WON'T HELP US I'M HEADING TO BLACK ROW. -TBNLS"