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mrlazyboy t1_j1su83d wrote

Not necessarily, but it depends.

Anything worth securing is using AES256 with GCM so this attack in particular has a computational complexity of 2^254 which is effectively infinity. The computational complexity of this problem is probably greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

Even using a quantum computer, the computational complexity using this attack would be equivalent to AES128 which is still a number you don't have the ability to even conceptualize.

If you want practical attacks against this type of thing, you should check out the BEAST, Lucky13, and CRIME attacks. Those are practical attacks against SSL and TLS.

Practical attacks are those you can actually execute in the wild. I think CRIME (a chosen plaintext attack that takes advantage of compression) only requires about 20,000 messages which is relatively small.

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maqp2 t1_j1tmlug wrote

Yeah, the 1.6-bit improvement is roughly 3.03x improvement. It's interesting we haven't yet seen snake oil claims like "AES 66% broken". In layman's terms, it's kind of like having to eat a cake that's 1/3rd the size of our galaxy. Sure, you got rid of 2/3rds of the cake size but your stomach will only fit so much.

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