Series

How It Breaks in Real Life

5 parts of 7

1. Part 1 How AES Breaks in Real Life: The Attacks That Never Touched the Cipher

   Jul 17, 2026 · 44 min read

   AES-the-cipher has never been broken in the field -- its deployments have. KRACK, repeated GCM nonces, and cache timing broke the wrapper, never the block.

2. Part 2 How the Hash Functions Broke in Real Life: MD5, Flame, SHATTERED, and the Long Death of SHA-1

   Jul 17, 2026 · 41 min read

   MD5 and SHA-1 were genuinely, mathematically broken -- yet every real breach still needed a second failure: a deployment still trusting the dead hash.

3. Part 3 How RSA Breaks in Real Life: ROCA, Bleichenbacher's Ghosts, FREAK, and the Keys That Shared a Prime

   Jul 17, 2026 · 44 min read

   No one has ever factored a strong, deployed RSA key -- yet ROCA, Bleichenbacher's oracle, DROWN, and FREAK broke real RSA anyway. The break was never the factoring.

4. Part 4 How Elliptic Curves and Diffie-Hellman Break in Real Life: The Discrete Log Never Fell

   Jul 18, 2026 · 45 min read

   No one has solved the discrete log on a strong curve or a 2048-bit group -- yet PS3, Android wallets, TPMs, CurveBall, and Logjam all fell. Here is exactly how.

5. Part 5 Q-Day Has Not Happened. The Incident Already Has: Harvest Now, Decrypt Later

   Jul 18, 2026 · 46 min read

   No quantum computer can break RSA in 2026, yet long-lived secrets encrypted today may already be lost. Harvest now, decrypt later is a deployment failure.

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