just out of curiosity.
I keep my files on a typical portable loop-AES256 encrypted file on a USB pendrive.
I was wondering, how secure is that?
I mean, what woud it takes to brute force the AES256 encryption or attack the password?
by the way the passphrase is 28 random characters.
thanks.
max

Attacking the password (if it's only alpha-numeric) should have a difficulty of about 28^64, and attacking AES (assuming no flaws) should have a difficulty of, off the top of my head, at least 2^128. i.e. an attacker would have to have super computers and thousands of years. A more realistic attack would be to compromise the machine that the drive is attached to and view the contents while it's mounted (remember, mounting the drive renders the encryption useless until it's unmounted again), or to use a keylogger to capture your password.

It makes no sense to attack the most solid defense presented. Successful attacks are almost never against the strongest link in the system, they come against the weakest link and in this case the weakest link is not the crypto or the key.