Hacking Any 3.50 system testers?

[doyama]

Hackers need to compromise every computer on the net and use their resources to run brute force test

It would take way too long to brute force it even with so many computers at your disposal.

 

[KiiWii]

I present to you: "DSi Encryption Put In Perspective", also known as "I Love Crushing People's Dreams".

Snip

Awesome post dude. Very informative.

 

[ComplicatioN]

I present to you: "DSi Encryption Put In Perspective", also known as "I Love Crushing People's Dreams".

The DSi uses 128-bit encryption (IIRC).
How do you break it? You find the correct encryption key.

How many encryption keys are there? 2 (binary, a bit) to the 128th power (number of bits), divided by 8 (8 bits in a byte).
That's so many that the calculator that comes with windows (at least XP) can't even display the number without reverting to scientific notation.

128-bits is...
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible values in binary.
However, Since there's 8 bits in a byte, you divide 128 by 8 and get 16. That's 16 bytes, 16 characters.
That's 18,446,744,073,709,552,000 possible values, ranging from 0x0000000000000000 to 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. Eighteen quintillion possible keys.
The actual number is a bit less less since a key will be a certain number of digits and be designed to not have repeating segments, but this puts it in perspective.

Let's say that you have a computer program which can try 50,000 unique keys a second.
That's 3,000,000 keys a minute.
180,000,000 keys in an hour.
4,320,000,000 keys a day.
1,576,800,000,000 keys in one year.

It would take 11,698,848 years to try all the keys at that speed.

damn...

 

[Zetta_x]

with those figures and 11,698,848 computers it would take 1 year

A brute force basically tries all the combinations, it's still possible for the very first attempt to find the right key as it is possible for the very last attempt to find the key. In a discreet structure mathematics class, we had to find the expected number of tries to find one password out of n different combinations which involved some pretty length summations and proofs but the answer was not even close to doing all the possible keys.

 

[doyama]

with those figures and 11,698,848 computers it would take 1 year

A brute force basically tries all the combinations, it's still possible for the very first attempt to find the right key as it is possible for the very last attempt to find the key. In a discreet structure mathematics class, we had to find the expected number of tries to find one password out of n different combinations which involved some pretty length summations and proofs but the answer was not even close to doing all the possible keys.

The current state of encryption is not to make it 'impossible' but more 'impractical' to brute force it. For example, most government agencies use 192 or 256-bit types of encryption. 128 bit is 'good enough' for consumer types of applications. It would take years of dedicated effort to break it, but by then the consumer product is probably out of date so it's not a huge issue. Obviously government data is viable for a long time, so they need to make sure it take a lot longer if you were to brute force it. So they're shooting for over 100 years of dedicated effort by a well funded government agency.

Of course you have those people trying to find better sifting methods to do factorization. Or you go the way of Wi-Fi where the encryption methodology itself is flawed so despite it being 64/128/192/256 encryption its 'relatively' easy to hack due to the underlying system being bad. Even the whole hoopla with 'quantum computers' is a bit overblown. The theoretical limit of improvement at this point of a theoretical quantum computer would be a halving of the # of bits. So realistically all you'd end up doing is going from 128->256 to get the same 'level' of protection. And doing so doesn't change how long the workflow takes by much. Again this if for some theoretical quantum computer that doesn't exist.