Re:NSA could break PGP? (Score 2, Insightful)

The NSA does not need to be able to break PGP. Passwords are used by people, and that's an inherent weakness. Any PGP password will be of finite length and finite complexity. So do you think it's beyond the NSA's ability to store massive lookup tables of every letter/number/symbol combination available on a standard 101-key keyboard, up to some finite length? Not hardly.

And is it difficult to implement this brute-force key search on the massively parallel architectures surely used by the NSA? Nope.

Think about the average complexity of any password a normal individual would use repeatedly, and you'll see how easy this really is. The NSA laughs their collective asses off at any commentary that begins, "The NSA cannot break [insert cipher name here]. Nobody can, not ever."

We don't even need to talk about differential cryptanalysis and other such exploits that would help to make the NSA's job even easier. Why bother? The weakness of the people who use the passwords is enough to "break" just about anything.

/sync