From there they gained access to the user database with passwords that were encrypted and "salted" – the latter a practice of adding a random string of characters during encryption to make it even harder to decrypt.
According to the Washington Post, this is already harder to decrypt files coming from devices running iOS 9 or later.
An advanced method (and harder to decrypt) would be to flip the word backwards and substitute the letters.
Q: What method was used to encrypt the passwords, and how hard will they be to decrypt?
The senior official from CSE said that information would be really, really hard for other agencies to decrypt.
The US Department of Justice is pushing for the defendant to be forced to decrypt her hard drive, claiming that if they cannot force such decryptions, law enforcement will be unable to gather important evidence.
In a recent child-pornography case, a federal judge halted an order that would have required the defendant to decrypt his hard drives, though a final ruling has yet to be made on the matter; the F.B.I. just announced that it had cracked the encryption on two of the nine hard drives it possesses, but it did not elaborate on the encryption scheme used on the drives or its method of decryption.
Modern ones look for the small chunk of code necessary to decrypt the virus, which is harder to tinker with.
The MPAA, meanwhile, is going after a software package given away freely on the Net called DeCSS, which allows a user to decrypt a DVD movie and put it on a hard disk.
