On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 10:38 +0000, Paul Sladen wrote: > On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Rowan Berkeley wrote: > > it should be possible to see the keyhole at least. > > You can see the keyhole---but it unremarkable because it looks exactly > the same as any other keyhole. > > What you can't see is any of the tumblers *in* the keyhole, or through > the keyhole to what is behind it, as that would be a security failure.
It's a cute metaphor, but inappropriate. Encryption doesn't lock a room, it changes the entire contents of the room into other, random atoms. There's no keyhole, no tumblers, nothing to see at all except nearly-random noise. We are very unlikely to see a genuine weakness in AES-256 in the immediate future. Regards, Tyler -- "Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil." -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love", by Robert A. Heinlein -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
