i remember before 128-bit encryption was being touted as impossible to decipher; now that technology has improved, is the claim still the same? i remember reading an article saying people broke it in a few hours, but i found that hard to believe since before it said it'd take like a century (literally) to crack. i know technology has improved, but not so much such that you can reduce the time from hundreds of years to a few hours. after all, technological growth, believe it or not, is not exponential, but rather linear by some coefficient.

Hacking is a Art Form not to be used in a way to harm someone. Yes, if the its password with 128 bit encryption it can be cracked within hours and if its Text then that could take days. Remember that the human mind made everything so yes it can be done.

dave_c: From what I've read, 128 bit encryption is still tough to crack. I say tough, but not impossible, since it would depend on resources. A Cray X1 (or equivalent supercomputer) probably wouldn't even break a sweat. Then again, not many hackers have access to a Cray. 8-) Solarian

An additional thought. Although still in the baby stages of development, a working quantum computer will probably be developed in our lifetime; manipulating binary data at the atomic, perhaps even quark, level. The theoretical, let alone hardware, challenges are enormous. Without getting into the physics, one of the toughest problems is isolating a computational result at the quantum level so it cannot be disturbed. Once the result is "seen," the wave function collapses, cannot be reconstructed, and all other related answers (possibilities) vanish. The development of a quantum computer will not be linear technology. It will truly be an exponential leap. Solarian

What's the algorithm? 128 bit Twofish is stronger than 128 bit AES, for example. Implementation matters, too. I trust open-source crypto much more than closed source, because any paranoid freak can review open-source code and try to spot weaknesses or backdoors. The human factor is also significant. You can have everything uber-encrypted, then get hacked and trojaned, and your private key gets copied without you ever knowing. Most hackers, government agencies, etc. would try this method first. If anyone could break 128 bit encryption, it would be the NSA with specialized hardware. Tens of thousands of dollars in specialized hardware can deliver the code-breaking performace of millions of dollars of general-purpose supercomputers. Oh, and computing power is increasing exponentially. See Moore's Law, noting that it's a logarithmic scale. And then there's always quantum computers, due in the next 50 or so years sometime. When we get them perfected, they should be able to crack our current best encryption in seconds, encryption that would take billions of years to crack on current computers.

Think about it this way. Your computer displays data sent to you by a server that is encrypted. It does this in a fraction of a second. It has the code to do this, so do other computers. Your system has to trade "keys" with the other computer to do this. Other computers only have to capture these keys, and poof, they can read the encrypted data as fast as you can. OK, so you protect the "keys" better. But the NSA knows how the server and your system goes about generating the keys, so all they need is a program that can guess at the keys being used, based on knowledge of how they are generated in the first place. Hacking the keys is then a lot quicker than breaking the encrypted data.

Sure you can crack 128bit encryption (any algorithm). Within 6 months you can probably crack a strong hash. This is assuming 8 character length, no hidden ASCII characters, brute force, and no crib. Now, that timeframe is assuming you have a small LAN cluster working on your problem (maybe about 12 machines at P4 2Ghz or higher). Smarter crackers will distribute their task through shell accounts or zombies. "technological growth, believe it or not, is not exponential, but rather linear by some coefficient." Or not. It's not quite a physical principle so much as an economic phenomena. All economic relationships are phenomena, whether economists consider them laws or not. It becomes really hard to try to steal private keys when the communicating parties don't even publicly share the public key. If you are serious about security, you make your own keys and they're both private.