Beiruty wrote:The encryption software provider would provide a back door access to the Federal Agencies and under the protection of no-see, no-tell, not-me....
It is true for almost all software providers.
This is why open source encryption is about all you can trust. Hopefully somebody spotted the errors in implementation before you downloaded it.
I don't think the NSA can crack AES256 if it's implemented correctly. That cipher leverages the one true uncrackable encryption tool, exclusive or.
It's called AES256 because the key is a 256 place binary number. That's pretty big. 1.15 times ten to the 77th power. Minus one, if you want to be nit-picky.
The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. If it were a sphere with that diameter, it would have a surface area of 3.14 times ten to the tenth power light years, a number that fits easily in 256 bits.
In fact, if my math is correct and the HP25 simulator on my iPhone hasn't been hacked by the NSA, the surface area of a Milky Way-sized sphere, expressed in square Angstroms, times 413,611,060,000,000 is what it takes to fill up a 256 bit number.
A 256 bit number is so large it could have even contained the national debt through nearly the first 90 days of Obama's third term in office, had we enjoyed his beneficence for another round.
It's that big.