How do they manage to do it when some simple encryptions are going to take years and the really good one (theoretically) centuries. Which other mean do they use except brute forcing?
In: 20
There are a lot of different ways.
Part of it is the entropy of your encryption will generally decrease over time (processing power improves/becomes more affordable to start scaling) leading to points where an encryption algorithm assumed Pretty Good 15 years ago is now in the costs less than 10 grand in compute time to brute force.
Additionally, novel exploits can reveal “Oh that ecliptic curve is actually predictable this way.”
All that to say, the other comments are accurate, breaking encryption is not as likely as someone social engineering the keys or even just being able to retrieve the decryption keys when they exfiltrated the encrypted data in the first place.
Most encryption breaches are going to be for situations where the individual has already retrieved your data but wasn’t able to get the keys to it (CC info, password manager vaults, your iCloud photo collection).
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