brainwagon

I subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter, because I have mostly passing interest in things having to do with cryptography. Today’s included a rather startling revelation:
AES may have been broken.
Bruce’s description of the work is intriguing, but it is far from clear whether this break is of more than strictly theoretical interest. Bruce says:

So, here’s the current scorecard. Courtois and Pieprzyk claim a 2^100-ish attack against AES. They claim a 2^200-ish attack against Serpent. This is an enormously big deal.

Assuming that it’s real.

No doubt more revelations to come in the future. I’m not throwing away my 3DES code just yet. :