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Comment on Finally Bitcasa CEO Explains How The Encryption Worksparent

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Sure, but known-plaintext attacks are not the worst part. Consider this [found via http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg089...]: I take the standard Wordpress config.php [for your host], fill in your site and account name, fill in the one million most common database passwords, and ask the cloud provider whether any of these hashes exist.

Or: I create a form (say .doc) with a single field, CC#, and hope people store this. I then check the existence of 10^11 hashes to find (all customers'!) credit card numbers (for a specific issuer). This takes only a CPU-day! (The network is obviously slower.)

Eh. OK let's say instead of just SHA-256'ing the plaintext data to derive a key you do 50,000 bcrypt rounds. Then the client encrypts the plaintext, hashes the ciphertext, and sends the hash to the server. If it takes 0.5 s to generate a single bcrypt key, it would take about 1,500 years to find a single credit card number.

Sure, but then it takes 0.5s per file to check whether the server and client are in sync, too.

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