metaweta

Thanks!

I think he ended up only spending around $5-10K on compute. I'd have to check with Nash.

Yeah, he knew it was a long passphrase.

There's no way that the AccessData job I had would exist today. Most services are online, with data encrypted in transit and stored in the cloud. TLS security has improved dramatically over the last decade in response to attacks like BEAST and BREACH and CRIME and POODLE. Google drops (? is going to drop?) your SEO ranking if you don't have proper certs installed. Nowadays, it's rare to find an attack on the connection from the browser to the server. Instead, it's either malware on the client or hacking into the servers, where the operators have terrible security practices like storing data unencrypted at rest.

The field of cryptography has grown tremendously, and there's still a lot of research being done. There have been many competitions for developing strong cryptographic primitives. There's a lot of work being done on zero knowledge proofs and verifiable computation. Cryptocurrency has encouraged lots of bright young minds to get involved.

One thing we learned from the Snowden revelations is that crypto works where it's applied, so every little bit of crypto helps. Run a Tor node if you can.

I kept a Cryptonomicon!

lol yeah

Looking, thanks!

Glad to hear it!

Lol thanks!

Thanks!

That little animation was put there by the guy who hired me. We got rid of it in the Password Recovery ToolKit that combined all the modules I'd written into a single tool. In that one, we had a big list of any encrypted files we found and their passwords. With enough modules, it was entertaining enough to watch the list grow. And it was very satisfying when the user reused a password on something trivial to crack that let us open a Word 97 file.