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Birukov and Khovratovich Attack on AES
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

You can find their paper here, a news story here, and Bruce Schneier’s blog on it here.

The summary is that they can break AES-192 and AES-256 with related-key attacks.

As they say, themselves, it isn’t a practical attack. They need far more data and memory than is practical — 2119 data for one of the attacks, which isn’t going to happen before we retire AES. One terabyte, for example, is 240, so this is needing half of a tera-tera-terabyte to start with.

Should you be worried? No. If anything, this is reassuring. It’s been almost a decade since AES was approved, and this is the first time a genuine-but-impractical attack has been found. You want to see impractical attacks on crypto-primitives, because that means that smart people are spending time attacking it.

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