Koodauw said:
Can someone explain a brute force attach to me?
Since I used to be involved with these all the time, let me try to explain. I used to work at the CSE, Communications Security Establishment, the Canadian version of the NSA, so I was involved with all sorts of cool communications and "spy" stuff while I was there, and one of them involved utilizing a Cray T3E to carry out, among many other things, brute force attacks.
A BFA involves breaking a cipher by trying every possible key. Whether the brute force attack will succeed or not depends on the key length of the cipher, and also on the amount of computational power you're using. Brute force attack is impossible against the ciphers with variable-size key, such as a one-time pad cipher, but otherwise, as we always used to say, nothing is impossible - it may be infeasible, but it's not impossible.
As a general rule, any cipher with a 64-bit key can be compromised with little difficulty (by an organization like ours, at least) using brute force. 128 bits is currently thought a minimum sensible key length for symmetric key algorithms, but I won't say any more about this.
So BFAs work well when dealing with symmetric situations. Sequential algorithms such as DES, 3DES, AES are "easy" to crack in this manner. When you start looking at asymmetric key algorithms though, things get more complicated and it really depends on the individual encryption algorithm. The currently breakable key length for the RSA algorithm is at least 512 bits (it has been done publicly), and recent research developments suggest that 1024 bits might be breakable in the near to medium term future. (I won't comment whether this is true or not for obvious reasons.) RSA is an excellent encryption scheme though, you can find out more about it by doing a Google search if you're curious.
Anyway, that should cover things for now. If you have any further questions, let me know.
