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On Friday, 5 March 2021 18:58:15 GMT you wrote: > On Friday, 5 March 2021 08:14:38 GMT Giles Coochey wrote: > > Encryption on its own is probably not enough, all the encryption > > algorithms in use 40 years ago are now trivial to decrypt without a key > > 40 years ago, yes it was 56 bit DES, if you heeded warning from Whitfield D > you shunned 56 bit. DES like ciphers from the 1980s could have been chosen > which are still "not bad" meaning the NSA can crack it. Oops hit send early. Also note that a lot of the cryptanalysis of 40 year old ciphers requires a lot of known plaintext, or similar, often the disks simply weren't that big back then. Heck most of the machines I used booted from floppy disk back then. But the point is threat model, I want to stop someone stealing my machine, stealing the data and messing around with any credit card, photos, or other secrets that have leaked into storage, or just abusing the email for targeted phishing my friends and relatives, or using saved access tokens for websites or email. If the NSA copy it (the disk will fail in 40 years), archive it till they have the decryption capability, sure they'll get my data if they can figure out how to mount old Linux partitions from 40 years ago, they'll be able to continue my browsing sessions from where I left off if any haven't expired - lucky them. Who knows, maybe 256 AES is no problem for them already?! Meanwhile if someone breaks in and steals my PC, the odds of the person stealing it getting enough personal data to be a problem is effectively zero. Ditto the password as a long original passphrase it is probably towards the limits of brute forcing by intelligence agencies, but they aren't my main threat. Intelligence agencies can pick my door locks and stick a USB device in whilst I'm out, or fly a wireless camera through a window, or hit me with a piece of rubber hose till I tell them whatever they want to know. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq