923 Bit Encryption Cracked

I bet you feel pretty safe with your 64 bit or even your 256 bit encryption key. Your data is safe and no one will ever get to it. You might not want to get too comfortable. Recently, Fujitsu researchers cracked a 923 bit encryption key. That is 278 digits.  They didn’t do it overnight or alone, they had the help of 252 processing cores, and it took just a little less than a half of a year, 148.2 days to be precise . That might seem like a long time, but it was once believed that a 923-bit encryption key would take hundreds of thousands of years to crack. All of the sudden a half a year doesn’t seem that long. Think of it this way: if they had started right after Christmas they would have already cracked the key.

This just shows us that no matter how safe you think your data is… it isn’t. It also reminds us not to take our security or privacy too lightly. Assume that if you have data on a device that is connected to the Internet, it is possible that someone else could find it. Like I have said in the past, I like the cloud – I just don’t trust  it.