It was fascinating to read the headlines this week about the terrible flaw that was discovered in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). It sounded like the end of security as we know it. I read blogs and articles that headlined “AES Broken” and “Fatal Flaw in AES”. It was fun reading, but completely misleading. So, what really happened?
Three cryptographers (Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger) found a slight mathematical weakness in the AES encryption algorithm and published a paper on their findings. These aren’t hackers trying to break into systems. These are professionals in their field working on cryptanalysis projects. This is what the professional cryptographic community does, and we all benefit from their work. They are to be applauded for their findings as it advances our understanding of cryptography and cryptanalysis, and this leads to more secure systems.
What is the practical impact of their finding? Do we all need to bunker down in a newly insecure world?
No. There is no practical attack on encrypted data with these findings. The effect is to weaken 128-bit AES encryption to about 126-bit AES encryption. That is still plenty strong and we don’t have to worry about new attacks on encrypted data. Here is a really good description from William Hugh Murray in the SANS newsletter:
“While this is a significant analysis, worthy of a paper, perhaps even a headline, an attack using this information, begun at the Big Bang, would not have completed yet. Kudos to the analysts.”
And I like this one from ScienceDaily.com (originally from a source at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) even better:
“Even with the new attack, the effort to recover a key is still huge: the number of steps to find the key for AES-128 is an 8 followed by 37 zeros. To put this into perspective: on a trillion machines, that each could test a billion keys per second, it would take more than two billion years to recover an AES-128 key.”
The earth is due to burn up in about 500 million years, so we don’t have anything to worry about quite yet.
By the way, this work points directly at the value of using standards-based encryption. The cryptographic community does not work much on non-standard algorithms and propriety methods. If there is a weakness in an encryption method, we really want the good guys to find it. Weaknesses in non-standard algorithms and methods are likely to go undetected for a much longer period of time.
For more information on AES encryption, download our white paper "AES Encryption and Related Concepts" and learn about how proper encryption and key management work together to secure your data.
Patrick
