Kim Dotcom shares three screenshots of Mega, shows 2048-bit RSA encryption will be used
December 8, 2012 9
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The government may have taken the first punch against Mega by taking down Me.ga, but Mega is far from out. In fact, it appears that Mega is still on track for a January 19 opening, despite opposition from the American government.
Indeed, Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload and now Mega, is excited about Mega. And in his excitement, he has provided a preview of Mega by sharing three screenshots via Twitter: one screenshot showing the generation of 2048-bit RSA keys that will supposedly encrypt all uploaded data, another screenshot showing the account creation page for Mega, and the last screenshot showing Mega’s online file manager. Check it out:
Excited for Mega? Let us know in the comments below!
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Isn’t 2048 bit encryption complete overkill? I was always under the impression that anything over 256 bit is just eye-candy to impress people into thinking it is more secure when in fact their password will be the weakest link in any of these encryption schemes. I recently read that nothing over 64 bit AES has ever been cracked so it seems 2048 would only serve to slow down the service. Any thoughts from somebody that knows about encryption?
@Eric989: You are comparing apples to oranges. AES is symmetric encryption (meaning you encrypt data with a password and must decrypt it with the same password). RSA is asymmetric encryption (meaning data is encrypted using a public key and must be decrypted with the private key).
2048-bit RSA encryption is, more or less, web standard. It is what most SSL connections use. When you log into dotTech, that is what we are using for our HTTPS connection.
@Ashraf: OK, that makes sense about symmetric vs asymmetric but I don’t see 2048-bit RSA on this site. When I log in, it shows Camellia-256, 256 bit keys. My bank uses RC4-128. I never remember seeing anything higher than 256 on a website. I am assuming that the 2048-bit RSA is something going on in the background maybe to establish the connection in the first place or something.
@Ashraf: Besides: If you want to mess with US.gov you rather have an encryption ‘overkill’ because they do have the resources to spend massive computing power to hunt you down. So IMHO 2048 isn’t even enough.
Regards, Frank
While I’ve never used this breed of site, I wish them all the luck in the world. All too often these days, my gov’t (AKA the bought-and-paid-for enforcement arm of the RIAA/MPAA) sucks the big one. As has been said before, we have the finest legislature money can buy.
@Eric989: Last time I heard, the Japanese cracked a 278-digit crypto (978-bit). However, is that it took them 148.2 days to crack it all open.
@Switch-kun: I made a statement specifically about AES. What you are talking about is a new pairing based encryption that they have found huge weaknesses in. AES has no such weaknesses and has been tested much more thoroughly. By most accounts it would take trillions upon trillions of years to break AES-256.
@Eric989: Ah, thanks for the heads up. Sorry about that.
@Eric989:
Dude Mega is just going to get shut down again soon as it opens. FBI are watching them like a hawk!
However i’m following a company who is due to launch next year that will compete with dropbox mediafire etc..
Check them out http://www.epicclouding.com
Lee.