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I write very much about the holy encryption software that promises to make your computer files untouchable by anyone without the right password or the correct keyfiles. People believe these softwares to be a safeguard for their computers, but how far this is true? Are these programmes 100% unbrakable or is there a way to bypass them?
It's true that the latest encryption algorithms are very good and AES has not been cracked yet. This ensures that only the person with the right password will ever access the computer. Now have you ever heard of brute force attacks? Of course you did. It's a technique used by the secret services and even some personal computers to crack passwords of encrypted files by using all the possible combinations.
How many combinations can a computer try per second? My laptop is a dual core Pentium and can only try fifty thousand passwords per second using the free program called Picozip Password Recover, which uses just one of the two processors. If a simple laptop bought in a small store can try about fifty thousand passwords per second imagine how a data center or servers could try. An organization with one thousand computers costing only two hundred thousand each could try about fifty million passwords per second and it's fast enough to break a 6 character password in less than half an hour if I am not mistaken. Now imagine the United States Government with computers costing billions of dollars and with millions of computers. In the book Digital fortress the author claims that NSA has a computer with 3 million CPUs. That are not ordinary ones, but computers designed only to this task. Each one can try more than one hundred thousand combinations per second. In total that makes three hundred billion combinations per second. A ten character long password has 839299365868101896 combinations. That super computer could break any ten character long password in just one month.
So how can you make your passwords long enough to stay away from the most expensive eyes in the world? You can use a billion character long passwords for every file you use. It's quite simple actually. All you need is a password generator software like a JavaScript password generator and make it make you a million passwords long at least. It is guaranteed that a password like that will never, ever, be broken in a lifetime... not even using all the computers in the world together.
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