Steven Lembark at Thursday 26 June 2008, 23:52:17 > > I submit that brute forcing an AES key of reasonably length is > > currently impossible in an amount of time that would matter to the > > human race. > > On average yes. > > As already pointed out, however, there is nothing > to prevent the first guess from matching a key and > cracking one particular example of the cipher in > 0.0001 seconds. A probability of something like 1 / 50000 to die in a car accident does not one prevent from driving a car. But a probability of 1 / (2^256) of finding the first key right away at the first guess is easily held up against key security of AES ... now that's a very strange mismatch. Apparently you consider the security of your life much, much less worth than security of your encrypted hard disk ... -- Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. (Rosa Luxemburg)