X-rays reveal censored portions of Marie Antoinette’s letters to Swedish count | Hacker News Reader

X-rays reveal censored portions of Marie Antoinette’s letters to Swedish count

arstechnica.com

120 pointslermontov69 comments

I guess we can just assume that one day all our encrypted communications and records will be deciphered by future historians.

This could get a bit awkward for the people who freeze themselves.

Might be a long time though right?

> On average, to brute-force attack AES-256, one would need to try 2^255 keys. (This is the total size of the key space divided by 2, because on average, you'll find the answer after searching half the key space.) So the time taken to perform this attack, measured in years, is simply 2^255 / 2,117.8 trillion

> Expressed as an exponent of 10, that’s 2.73 * 1061. Written in full format:

>27,337,893,038, 406,611, 194,430,009, 974,922,940, 323,611,067, 429,756,962, 487,493,203 years.

>In English: 27 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.

From-https://scrambox.com/article/brute-force-aes/

I’d love to hear Hacker News opinions on how long that will be valid due to faster computers, quantum computing etc. Or if it will always pretty much be valid in your opinion?

The number they get for all the PCs on earth trying it is still 13,689 trillion trillion trillion trillion years. The universe is only 14 billion years old and estimates of what the universe will be like in even a trillion years are more like science fiction than science because it is so wildly long.

That article doesn’t talk about GPU decryption at all, which is many multitudes faster, and also it’s only talking about finding a specific AES key. It may be possible to search for multiple keys in parallel in the future, which could cut this figure down by the corresponding amount (if the goal is just to find some keys, and not specific ones).

Yes, they can be a hundred times faster so now it's only 273,378,930,384,066,111,944,300,099,749,229,403,236,110,674,297,569,624,874,932 years.

More seriously, GPUs are faster because they are highly parallel, and parallelism can only give you a speedup that is linear with the number of processing units. So unless you're planning to build a GPU with trillions units, that won't help much.

A farm of a billion GPUs, each with a thousand cores sounds quite feasible with today's tech and gets you to trillion-times speedup of brute force. So, feel free to divide by 10^12... still not tractable.

Have you tried to buy a GPU lately?

I was in the market for a single GPU about 6 months ago, it shipped in a week and didn't break the bank. Buying a billion GPUs is an entirely different question. I'd look into buying fab equipment and doing a custom architecture. Given the length of the computation we're talking about, even a decade of lead time wouldn't significant. But as I understand it, current lead times are still less than a year.

This assumes current computing speeds. The comment above talks about the future so you need to assume quantum computing exists.

https://www.nist.gov/publications/quantum-resistant-public-k...

AES is still believed to be quantum resistant.

But I see articles that say quantum computing will ruin encryption and some that say it won't. I don't know what to believe as it isn't my area of expertise.

Quantum computing solves RSA.

Quantum Computers, if and when they work in practice, will break some algorithms, halve the 'bit-security' (e.g. 256 -> 128bit) of some algorithms, and leave the other quantum-safe ones untouched.

So encryption will still work in a quantum world. We 'just' have to update the algorithms we use.

It will and it won't.

Quantum computing could allow an implementation of Shor's algorithm to exist. This algorithm breaks RSA which is the basis of a lot of asymmetric cryptographic implementations such as TLS and SSH. By breaking here we mean that it is trivial to crack. It is unclear right now whether or not an equivalent attack applies to elliptic curve-based algorithms which are gaining in popularity.

As far as symmetric encryption is concerned, the standard right now is AES-128 and AES-256 and might be vulnerable to Grover's algorithm which would effectively half the effective number of bits so AES-128 becomes roughly equivalent to a non-existing AES-64 which would be somewhat trivial to crack. However, data encrypted with AES-256 would simply go down to AES-128 which is still considered "good enough" as of today.

In practice, by the time we have real quantum computers there will be a new standard for both of asymmetric and symmetric encryption so it does not matter as much as one would think.

TLDR: RSA will break, elliptic curves might break, AES will be weakened and the impact on your life will probably be minimal.

Shor's algorithm works fine for the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP)[1]. So it'll break ECC.

There's no indication that it can be used to break several other types of problem that can be used in asymmetric cryptography. These other problems are less efficient and have different trade-offs (some have huge keys, some have huge outputs, some are really slow) and picking appropriate parameters to make them usable while still being secure is a difficult problem. Solving that is the aim of NIST's post-quantum standardization effort.

[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/51346/shors-algor...

Didn't know about ECC, thanks!

The mass of Earth is about 6E24kg. The crust makes up about 1% of that, and silicon makes up about 28% of that. So about 1.68E22kg silicon is available on Earth. Assume we convert all of that to a giant computer, capable of operating at Bremermann's Limit[1]. That would give about 2.28E72 (quantum) operations/second. 2^255 / 2.28E72 ≈ 25400 seconds to count to 2^255. Figure a measly 100 operations to test each key, and you're looking at a month per key to brute-force. And that's ignoring light-speed communication delays between parts of the computer, which would dominate.

If it looks like someone is going to build a quantum computer out of the entire mass of the silicon in Earth's crust, I suggest 512-bit keys. That'll keep your secrets safe for about 9E73 years. I'd also suggest finding a new planet to live on, the mining operation would likely be somewhat disruptive.

For a more realistic comparison, perhaps they've only got a computer with as much mass of iron ore as the recent annual world production for the last thousand years (2.5E9 tonnes/year = 2.5E15 kg). Then it'll take around 5000 to run 2^255 operations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit

> And that's ignoring light-speed communication delays between parts of the computer, which would dominate.

Light speed delays are not relevant to a highly concurrent problem. They would be an issue for a general purpose computer that size running a sequential program.

True if it's not a quantum computer. For a quantum computer, the entanglement effects propagate at the speed of light, so you can't just treat it as independent trials. Of course if it's lots of quantum computers you'd get some advantages, but you can't run Grover's on an ensemble so I'm not quite sure what the resulting complexity would end up being (you can run it on each individual QC, but I don't know how the resulting complexity would be calculated).

Either way it's a bit beyond what's economically possible for any human organization right now. And I implicitly assumed the computation is fully reversible and therefore took negligible energy.

Generalized Quantum Search with Parallelism — https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9904049

“We generalize Grover's”…

“We extend the analysis to the case of a society of k quantum searches acting in parallel”.

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about the topic, but the first link I googled seems to justify my intuition that this decryption could be partitioned so that many quantum computers could run in parallel (thus avoiding the limit on speed of information transfer you are hypothesising).

> Either way it's a bit beyond what's economically possible for any human organization right now. And I implicitly assumed the computation is fully reversible and therefore took negligible energy.

Agree - I’m just being that contrary Internet!

Unless they can figure out reversible computing to the point their computer doesn't really need any power, they also have to contend with the Landauer limit, so counting to 2^255 (at current cosmic microwave background temperature) would need about 2^255 k 3kelvin ln(2) / c^2 = ~9 million solar masses of fuel (assuming perfect effeciency).

Some algorithms of the past weren't cracked because we could brute-force them, but because somebody found a weakness that reduced the computational need by many orders of magnitudes. This could happen to AES as well.

I highly recommend reading “The Code Book” by Simon Singh if anyone wants to learn about old ciphers and how they were cracked.

I really enjoyed reading it.

Quantum computing would use Grover's algorithm, which is provably optimal for accelerating a brute-force search. That reduces the key space by half (so square root of the effort), eg AES-256 requires about 2^127 quantum operations to crack on average, instead of 2^255.

Bremermann's Limit[1] puts a fundamental limit on the rate of computation for any given amount of mass of about 1.36e50 bit changes/second/kg. Unless you get an amount of mass of literally planetary scale (as large as, say, Mercury) to take part in your computation the time will be enormous even for a 256-bit key.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit

If you asked someone in the 50s how long until you could have 1TB of data in a chip the size of a fingernail (also cheap), it would've probably laughed and said "in a million years". Yet, here we are now ...

I went back to 1959 to ask Gordon Moore. He wasn't too far off on his guess. I do hope he heeds my advice and invests in bitcoin.

The VENONA project also indicates that far less than complete decryption is required for devastating results.

FWIW symmetric encryption has been really solid for a long time.

DES, pretty much the first strong civilian encryption algorithm, is crackable due to brute-forcing the 56-bit key space, which has been pointed out as a security problem almost 50 years ago, but in terms of cryptanalysis it's doing ok.

AES will turn 25 soon and the best cryptanalyses today are like a factor four faster than brute-force (but require rather significant memory, which brute force doesn't), which is basically nothing.

MC Frontalot did a song about exactly that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUPstXCqyus

If you ignore technological breakthroughs

Likely, but unless you're Marie Antoinette nobody will ever bother reading them

The research team was doing to as a technical proof of concept using readily-available letters. They didn’t especially care about Marie Antoinette.

The Ars article is terrible at conveying this; you have to get to the 7th paragraph to get even the first hints of this. I usually expect better from them.

I agree. I was trying to find out what synchrotron they used, Ars doesnt say! Went to read the paper, apparently they used some portable device for the xrf instead.

The most, um, interesting thing I learned from this was about "soaking"...[0]

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgb88/viral-jump-humping-ti...

Yeah, I too enjoyed learning about soaking and having your friend jump on the bed beside you.

Ah, God bless all the horny teenagers trying to rationalise their way around a belief system derived from an Iron Age society.

Always puts me in mind of a certain Garfunkel and Oates song. (nsfw)[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY

> Hyperspectral imaging in the visible and near-infrared ranges initially seemed promising. Unfortunately, the black redaction ink absorbed almost all light in the visible range, and in the NIR range, the two inks were rendered largely transparent. They were too similar to draw any conclusive results. Pottier and his collaborators got the best results with X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy in a microscanning mode

Does anyone know what are the other use cases for these techniques? The article is very interesting! Thanks for sharing

Non-imaging X-ray fluorescence is one of the most common techniques for identifying the elemental composition of metal alloys, including both industrial metallurgy and verification of gold and silver coins in precious metals trading. Handheld XRF scanners are readily available but cost several thousand dollars.

Makes me wonder how destructive this X-ray scan was.

Of all the millions of mysteries throughout history, why are we wasting time on Marie Antoinette's love life? This article is already nearly tabloid journalism, and I bet this story shows up in actual tabloids soon.

What is not interesting to you may be interesting to others. Someone "wasting" time on something you don't think useful doesn't prevent others working on something else.

It's not like society is bound to work on one thing at a time...

The resources available for this kind of work are limited, this is a new kind of x-ray that presumably has limited machines available and a high operating cost.

And I didn't say uninteresting. The authour of the letters purposefully removed the lines from the historical record for modesty's sake. It's similar to digging through a celebrity's trash to find salacious gossip.

> The authour of the letters purposefully removed the lines from the historical record for modesty's sake

How to know before finding out?

From the context of the letters, the rest of the words and where they were found. He seems to have only edited a few lines throughout letters. At most, checking one of the letters would have been enough.

Well, now they have used a new novel system to bypass the censorship

If you fail to see the value of how this novel way can be used for other letters beyond this initial test case, then there's not much else to say I feel

>If you fail to see the value of how this novel way can be used for other letters beyond this initial test case

This initial test case based on a technique already in practice on other sources of writing? None of my posts have dismissed the technology, just it's use in this case.

This is a fallacy that is mostly driven by difference in personality. People are roughly divided into people who are driven and interested by "things" (nearly the entirety of this website) and people who are interested and driven by "people". There is some crossover with objectification of people but thats not relevant.

Scientific methods relating to historical and archeological discovery are immensely important, this article in particular highlights something that may indicate many other hisorical letters/documents may contain previously missed information that while likely mostly mundane minutae, a shining example could alter how we understand history and the interplay of historical figures.

That said it seems this just referencing a less common use of a specific technology to solve a problem which I suppose is appropriate

The scientific process is interesting, and I don't object to it's use on Egyptian papyrus or the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I find it unlikely anyone was expecting to find some revelatory details in the letters between Marie Antoinette and her alleged lover. They just wanted to know more about her intimate affairs.

This was really more of a proof of technique. Marie Antoinette’s letters were readily available (the team is French).

The article on Ars is pretty shit at conveying that - you have to get to the 7th paragraph for any technical details to come up - but that’s an(other) indictment of Ms. Oulette, not the research team.

From the article

>So when Fabien Pottier and several colleagues at the Museum of Natural History's Research Center for the Conservation of Collections (CRCC) took on the task of uncovering the censored portions of letters between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen, they naturally turned to similar techniques.

That doesn't sound like developing the method was their primary goal.

Right, the article is garbage. The paper is in an open-access journal. You can just go read it.

> People are roughly divided into people who are driven and interested by "things" (nearly the entirety of this website) and people who are interested and driven by "people".

I'd put that very differently. Some are interested in what they have, others in what they do, the rest in how they do. And, I don't think that people on HN are predominantly interested in things. I think they're above all interested in acts.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...

The division is long established in the scientific lit - just highlighting it exists.

Thanks for the reference! Wasn't aware.

if you want some more substantial further reading, search around the "things-people" and "data-ideas" dimensions are surprisingly established and quite interesting.

Ideas > Events > People

Actually it seems most of the information about Marie antoinette were actually politically motivated slurs made up during revolution. So it's still interesting to distinguish history from propaganda about her libertine life. I think it's particularly interesting in our context, to study what slurs are still repeated aftet two centuries

Come on. Reading redacted text in hustorical records is an interesting achievement. I guess the authors hoped for more interesting secrets then kind words that might be interpreted as love letters?

I doubt it, they picked the letters between Marie Antoinette and her alleged lover for a reason.

Can you suggest some historical mysteries that do not receive attention but should? It is my impression that the broad strokes of history are well covered so it is on this level that historical research now takes place.

The bonds between Swedish and French nobility during this time period are interesting. About twenty years after these events, one of Napoleon's marshals was offered the Swedish crown and became king of Sweden.

>Can you suggest some historical mysteries that do not receive attention but should?

The article mentions the process being used on Egyptian papyrus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are countless other recovered bits of parchment that the process could be used on from around the world, possibly uncovering more primary sources about antiquity.

Or just like any other of von Fersen's letters would probably be more illuminating about French Swedish relations, though I don't know if they were censored. His fondness of Antoinette was already known.

Let people enjoy stuff.

Please post all the love letters you have ever written or received, without any editing. Let people enjoy stuff.

This is reductio ad absurdum and a clear strawman.

I'm asking you to be put in basically the same situation, not an opposite one. The biggest difference is I'm asking for your permission.

My argument was never that Antoinette deserves some special privacy, so changing the subject of the act is not a strawman. Why should people enjoy someone else's private correspondence but not yours?

I'm still alive, I haven't been dead 200 years. Do whatever you want with my private correspondence when I've been dead for 200 years.

So you're fine with your private correspondence being public long after your death. Does it matter that von Fersen clearly wasnt? He knew his letters would be public and purposely blacked out parts.

Sure why not. I'm dead. It has zero impact on me. It might even help historians understand our way of life, in which case by all means.

I'm not so selfish and conceited that I pretend to still care about things after death, lol.

> Dear Sweden

> I just heard. What the fuck? I really liked Descartes! I sent him over so we could share, and you go killing him?! Fuck. This is why we can't have nice things.

> Toodles, Marie.

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