
Ask HN: Schrodinger's Encryption: Secure and broken at the same time? - emblem21
Isn&#x27;t all crypto secure against a highly defined category, but assumed to be broken by actors outside of that category with greater intellectual assets?
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veddox
Replace "intellectual assets" with "computing assets" and you're probably
right. The basic idea behind current cryptography is to make the
breaking/decoding without a key so expensive as to be practically impossible.
Of course, "practically impossible" always refers a an assumed amount of
available computing power. (Disclaimer: I'm no expert.)

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CiPHPerCoder
Time cost and energy cost.

There's a minimum amount of energy needed to flip a bit.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle)

By taking this value, how much energy does it take to brute-force a 256-bit
AES key (average case of 2^255 key guesses plus the cost of verification)?

1.59546665 × 10^56 joules

This is about a billion times more energy than our Sun will ever produce.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29)

