Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeanne Boyarsky
Perhaps so participants in other countries know they have the right tools to unencrypt the file. This is also likely the reason that FIRST isn't using a stronger form of encryption in the first place. Not as an invention to crack it.
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It's more likely simply that AES is the default encryption you get when you encrypt a PDF with a password. It used to be DES 40/56 but that's so easy to crack with modern equipment that I don't think it's even an option these days.
Given the passwords from the past few years, there's enough entropy that a heuristic dictionary attack would be unlikely to provide a result in a 3 day timeframe. Similarly, it wouldn't be possible to scan a 128 bit keyspace without some serious distributed processing power.
So this whole discussion is an academic exercise at best.
(I am not a crypto-nerd, but I can spend an hour explaining Diffie-Hellman.)