Codebreaking Has Moved on Since Turing’s Day, With Dangerous Implications

by Bill Buchanan, The Conversation

Recent interest in computing and cryptography pioneer Alan Turing surrounding the release of a new movie, “The Imitation Game,” which details Turing’s work breaking Nazi codes in World War II, offers an opportunity to see the massive gains that have been made in the field of codebreaking, writes Edinburgh Napier University professor Bill Buchanan.

In Turing’s day, cryptography was a mechanical and intellectual process, relying on complex machines and the genius of Turing and his peers to encipher and decipher messages. The challenge of cracking the ciphers of the Nazi Enigma and Lorenz codes led to the creation of some of the earliest computers: the electromechanical Bombe designed by Turing and Gordon Welchman, and Colossus, the first programmable electronic digital computer.

Since WWII, computing power orders of magnitude greater than what Bombe and Colossus were capable of is available to anyone through cloud computing. Encryption also has advanced, but the raw power available is making some methods irrelevant. For example, Buchanan says hashed passwords can be relatively easily defeated by throwing cloud resources at the task. Adding a salt, or random string of text, to the hash can dramatically increase the number of computations needed to decipher a password, but with enough computing power, it is still just a matter of time.  Article