[Cryptography] Rumor has it that AES-256 is broken (again!)

[R. Hirschfeld]

> From: Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net>
> Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2016 13:52:07 -0700

> 1)  Major breakthrough in factoring reduces factoring time by many
>     orders of magnitude.  Unlikely at best, and would qualify someone
>     for a Nobel prize in mathematics.

Quite a feat as there's no Nobel prize in mathematics!  ;-)

As for unlikely, I've seen reports (from more credible sources) that
after Babai's breakthrough on graph isomorphism, factoring could be
next (although I'm not sure of the connection other than both problems
have long not been known to be either in P or NP-hard).

> Reporters
> getting stories just plain wrong, after all, has happened at least
> once in the history of the universe.

Perhaps there has been some breakthrough in factoring but the
implications were misreported.  It would impact crypto but maybe not
AES directly, except to the extent that factoring-based algorithms are
used to encrypt AES keys (something it's easy to imagine a reporter
getting wrong).

All speculation, though, and the article does read as BS or at least
sloppy journalism.