Even with access to the fastest computers in the world, it could literally take years to guess the right key. If you don’t have that key, you’d have to guess at what the key might be then look at the results of decrypting the message with that key to see if you have anything but unintelligible gibberish. To decrypt a message, just like with the Enigma machine, you need to know the key that was used to encrypt it. Intercepting your text messages isn’t actually difficult but decrypting those messages is, at best, impractical. The type of encryption used on the iPhone and Android is called AES and it’s formidable. This is all done behind the scenes without the user ever being aware of it. Almost every smartphone in use today, encrypts text messages and other data automatically. What makes encryption different today is that it is also being used by millions of ordinary people, many of whom have no idea they are even using it. Today, terrorists are using encryption to hide their communications just like the Nazis did in WWII. If this has peaked your curiosity, check out the movie U-571 (a fictional account of the effort to obtain an Enigma machine) and The Imitation Game about the team that figured out the encryption key. Ultimately the Allies figured it out and it helped them win the war. The Allies worked very hard to get their hands on one of these devices so they could learn how it works and be able to decrypt the messages and know what the German military plans. That message could only be decoded if you knew the key used to encrypt it. It looked like a typewriter but had an encryption key that changed a message into unreadable noise. The device came to be known as an Engima machine. During World War II, the Germans created a way of sending encrypted messages to commanders in the field. The current controversy over encryption is really important to me. As the Founder and CEO of a software company that makes a development tool for mobile platforms, as well as for desktop and web, I have a lot of experience with encryption.
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