Posted on 01/13/2020 7:23:50 PM PST by Theoria
Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.
Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of a continuing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.
“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on technology companies to find a solution and complaining that Apple had provided no “substantive assistance.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Time and energy required to brute-force a AES-256 encryption key.I did a report on encryption a while ago, and I thought I'd post a bit of it here as it's quite mind-boggling.
AES-256 is the standardized encryption specification. It's used worldwide by everyone from corporations to the US government. It's largest key size is 256 bits. This means that the key, the thing that turns encrypted data into unencrypted data, is string of 256 1s or 0s.
With each character having two possibilities (1 or 0), there are 2256 possible combinations. Typically, only 50% of these need to be exhausted to yield the correct key, so only 2255 need to be guessed. How long would it take to flip through each of the possible keys?
When doing mundane, repetitive calculations (such as brute-forcing or bitcoin mining), the GPU is better suited than the CPU. A high-end GPU can typically do about 2 billion calculations per second (2 gigaflops). So, we'll use GPUs.
Say you had a billion of these, all hooked together in a massively parallel computer system. Together, they could perform at 218 flops, or
2,000,000,000,000,000,000 keys per second (2 quintillion)
1 billion gpus @ 2 gigaflops each (2 billion flops)
Since there are 31,556,952 seconds in a year, we can multiply by that to get the keys per year.
*31,556,952
=6.311390425 keys per year (~10 septillion, 10 yottaflops)
Now we divide 2255 combinations by 6.311390425 keys per year:
2255 / 6.311390425
=9.173263150 years
The universe itself only existed for 14 billion (1.410) years. It would take ~6.740 times longer than the age of the universe to exhaust just half of the keyspace of a AES-256 keys.
On top of this, there is an energy limitation. The Landauer limit is a theoretical limit of energy consumption of a computation. It holds that on a system that is logically irreversible (bits do not reset themselves back to 0 from 1), a change in the value of a bit requires an entropy increase according to kTln2, where k is the Boltzmann constant, T is the temperature of the circuit in kelvins and ln2 is the natural log(2).
Lets try our experiment while considering power.
Most high-end GPUs take around 150 watts of energy to power themselves at full load. This doesn't include cooling systems.
One billion GPUS will require: 1 billion gpus @ 150 watts
150,000,000,000 watts (150 gigawatts)
1.511 wattsThis is enough power to power 50 million american households.
The largest nuclear power reactors (Kashiwazaki-Kariwa) generate about 1 gigawatt of energy.
1.511 watts / 1 gigawatt = 150
Therefore, 1 billion GPUs would require 150 nuclear power plant reactors to constantly power them, and it would still take longer than the age of the universe to exhaust half of aN AES-256 keyspace.
1 billion GPUs is kind of unrealistic. How about a supercomputer?
The Tianhe-2 Supercomputer is the world's fastest supercomputer located at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. It clocks in at around 34 petaflops.
Tianhe-2 Supercomputer @ 33.86 petaflops (quadrillion flops) =33,860,000,000,000,000 keys per second (33.86 quadrilion)
3.38616 * 31,556,952 seconds in a year
2255 possible keys 2255 / 1.068518424=1.068518424 keys per year (~1 septillion, 1 yottaflop)
=5.418347952 years
That's just for 1 machine. Reducing the time by just one power would require 10 more basketball court-sized supercomputers. To reduce the time by x power, we would require 10x basketball court-sized supercomputers. It would take 1,038 Tianhe-2 Supercomputers running for the entirety of the existence of everything to exhaust half of the keyspace of a AES-256 key.
And, Mariner, these calculations are assuming that the key would be hit in the first half of the key set. The odds of that are only 50%.
Another encryption specialist did a calculation on the energy to do the entire key set. . . It exceeded the energy available in the universe. ROTFLMAO! His conclusion was that any computer that could do the job would need to be made out of something other than matter, run on something other than energy, and extend into another universe.
Please inform us how apple can “break the code” in detail - if you will?
Not only does Apple have the ability, so does NSA. And anyone else with supercompute capability.
been tried and failed many times
Could you please copy and paste that section here so that we can all see it? I’d like to see it.
It’s like the Bible: I’ve read and heard pieces of it, but have never actually sat and read the whole thing.
Thank you.
The FBI got rid of the rest of her gadgets
Wow, why the bitterness toward Apple
They were likely once ardent MS computer users and still feel the bitterness from MS losing to Apple on the phone front. Irrational reactions.
This “security” scam of theirs is a marketing tool and I realize that.
The hash code is stored in the cloud I believe - the device knows nothing
I know everything about encryption
Note to self I’m alive but the user of the iphone is dead. There seems to be a conflict here
all data a person could possibly need could be eventually compressed and encrypted down and stored in a single digit number.
Done - the answer is 43 which reduces to 7 :)
Screw Apple. Nothing but MeToo.
Unlock the f-ing phone.
1) He was never an American Citizen
2) He was a foreign military saboteur and terrorist
3) The constitution does not protect the rights of enemy combatants
4) He’s dead so he won’t care
What’s up with this? The adept of Justice has No access to a government Super computer that could probably crack the encryption in a half hour?who do they think their fooling?
So as our enemy, you support the terrorist
Here is a clue to the DOJ.
Everyone on his call list has already dumped their phones or changed their numbers.
Morons
Prolly not admissible since such tech “doesn’t constitutionally exist”...
Indeed. Apple spends a lot of money to make their phones secure enough that not even they can hack them. It's a selling point, and one of the biggest reasons I use an iPhone rather than Android or something else. (is there anything else?) Fedgov has tried beating corps into adding back doors to their products since back in the 'clipper chip' days. I am not surprised at all that Barr supports that effort. Not one bit.
The NSA has, at the very least, the metadata associated with any calls that might have been made to/from these phones. If they weren't looking more closely at these foreign nationals, then perhaps they need to rethink spending so much time spying on honest Americans, and their work attempting to facilitate a coup against our sitting president.
Uh, some of us do. The fact that Apple puts as much effort into making their phone unhackable (even with physical access, which is normally 'game over' in the computer security world), is one of the main reasons I use an iPhone rather than something else. I, like many others are willing to pay for that additional level of security.
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