Benm
0
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2007
- Messages
- 7,896
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- 113
That would become quite problematic indeed.
Truecrypt is a very strange story, and the reasons support and development stopped are still unclear. It did pass some security audits though, and law enforcement reported difficulty decrypting these volumes without extracting they key for the suspect (which can be quite hard if the suspect is say, dead as a doornail).
7 zip has had some recent issues too, though they have apparently been patched (no proper proof of that).
But an important thing to notice with vulnerabilities is how bad they are, or are not. No vulnerabilities have been reported in either truecrypt or 7zip that would allow you to access a volume or file quickly as long as the passphrase is decent.
Even if there was a severe vulnerability that reduced cracking effort by 2^20 (a million times), something that would normally talk a million years to decrypt on a desktop computer would still be safe from oppurtunistic hackers (that will not spend a full year hacking into something they don't know contains something very valuable). Sure the NSA coud crack it quickly with some effort, but that's not the enemy most people have.
And in case you worry about that million years extra: make your passphrase 4 characters longer, that'd easily overcome any brute force attempt even if the encryption is compromised by 2^20.
Truecrypt is a very strange story, and the reasons support and development stopped are still unclear. It did pass some security audits though, and law enforcement reported difficulty decrypting these volumes without extracting they key for the suspect (which can be quite hard if the suspect is say, dead as a doornail).
7 zip has had some recent issues too, though they have apparently been patched (no proper proof of that).
But an important thing to notice with vulnerabilities is how bad they are, or are not. No vulnerabilities have been reported in either truecrypt or 7zip that would allow you to access a volume or file quickly as long as the passphrase is decent.
Even if there was a severe vulnerability that reduced cracking effort by 2^20 (a million times), something that would normally talk a million years to decrypt on a desktop computer would still be safe from oppurtunistic hackers (that will not spend a full year hacking into something they don't know contains something very valuable). Sure the NSA coud crack it quickly with some effort, but that's not the enemy most people have.
And in case you worry about that million years extra: make your passphrase 4 characters longer, that'd easily overcome any brute force attempt even if the encryption is compromised by 2^20.