Encryption Security May Not Be Secure Anymore (Possible AES Crack) | Hacker News Reader

Encryption Security May Not Be Secure Anymore (Possible AES Crack)

yournewswire.com

11 pointsemilong14 comments

Seems very dubious:

* As one poster mentioned, as far as I know factoring has nothing at all to do with AES.

* Mentions of it have previously been cropping up on conspiracy theory sites: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1120355/pg1

* Nothing on the University of Toronto's press office page: http://media.utoronto.ca/media-releases/

* Terms like "Quadratic Curves embodied within numeric sentences such as Fibonacci Sequences, Non-Evenly Divisible Values including PI, Catalan Numbers, Mersenne Primes" set off my crank mathematics alarms pretty badly.

* ACA doesn't seem to have a section for presenting abstracts. Possibly they meant a poster? It can't be a full paper, because acceptance notification for that isn't until July 13th, 2016 (http://www.mathematik.uni-kassel.de/ACA2016/images/poster.pd...)

Is there any source for this that's less dodgy? Is it any different from the known weaknesses in the key derivation for AES-256?

Yeah, that site didn't impress me, either. If true, though, this is huge.

Every bit as huge, I'm sure, as some of the other perfectly believable news this site has broken, such as:

http://yournewswire.com/stanley-kubrick-confesses-to-faking-...

http://yournewswire.com/us-senate-admit-that-chemtrails-are-...

http://yournewswire.com/queen-elizabeth-ordered-bin-laden-pl...

http://yournewswire.com/are-you-being-attacked-by-psychic-va...

* > Is there any source for this that's less dodgy?*

The press-release link doesn't even go to any press release.

From the article:

> […] the press release has been removed and they are not responding when asked if they still plan to release the source code and take the abstract of their final paper to the conference in Kassel, Germany.

Edit: That does not mean that this story is not complete horseshit.

The "press release" links to here: http://www.mathematik.uni-kassel.de/ACA2016/ which is definitely not the University of Toronto's Math or CS department page.

And YourNewsWire doesn't look like a reliable news source. (It has an entire category on the menu for "conspiracies".)

The link is to a conference in Germany, which apparently does not have all sessions on its website yet. A conference in Germany is mentioned in the alleged press release. On the other hand, University of Toronto does not mention this on its press page (yet?): https://www.utoronto.ca/news

Might be fake, but I guess the question is when, not if, this will happen.

Setting aside if this is true or not (and my gut feeling is that it is not), given the widespread impact of an AES or RSA crack what should one do with such knowledge? It seems irresponsible to just publish it and let the chips fall. On the other hand if you've spent your entire career in the field such a breakthrough would be the ultimate achievement and would expand your career opportunities a thousandfold and it would be very difficult to keep it to yourself or a handful of colleagues sworn to secrecy.

Way too vague. It talks about the output of the AES block algorithm being definitively non-random for certain inputs but then talks about factoring integers which has nothing to do with symmetric transforms.

I'd (obviously) question their code, the implementations of their algorithms, etc. instead. Also, no university I know publishes results like this instead of in a respectable journal. If you really wanted to be fancy, you'd call a press conference, not some dodgy PR news service.

Integer factoring has nothing to do with AES Crack. Are they talking about RSA?

Here are all UofT press releases: http://media.utoronto.ca/media-releases/

Note that this is nowhere to be seen.

Can anybody confirm this?

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