Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) Gets Cracked

Published Tue, Jul 4 2006 20:32 | William
Took'em 1 year to crack PGP? My a55.  It took them about an hour to have some dude at the NSA crack it, then they spent the rest of the year waiting to make the announcement

Comments

# skicow said on July 5, 2006 1:31 PM:

Bill,


Had me scared there with the title of this post...I keep my *** encrypted with PGP and if it was cracked my wife would find it and kill me!! ;)

The article doesn't say that PGP was cracked, in fact they don't say how they got access to the encrypted files.  Also, they don't say what encryption was being used to encrypt the files....Jon Callas of PGP is interviewed for the article but that's the only tie to PGP that this article has -- unless there is more about this case that I'm clueless too (nothing new! ;)

From what Jon Callas says he thinks that they are using a "smart" brute force attack to get access to the files since the power of encryption today would take forever (with todays processing power).

# skicow said on July 5, 2006 1:32 PM:

What the?!? Your blog software censors the word p-r-0-n?

# Tony said on September 5, 2006 3:38 PM:

There was a recent statement by a police officer in the UK, shortly after the arrest of 'terrorist suspects. The police wanted to hold them a bit longer and the detective said on TV "...we need some more time to unscramble the encrypted files on [their] Pc's...". Now, PGP being the encryption of choice by any self-respecting terrorist, this statement leads me to conclude that the PGP cipher is no longer un-crackable in a sensible time-frame.

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