Reddit mentions of The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes

There is an assumption beneath all of this math. And that is that there are no short cuts (or at least no significant short cuts) to working SHA256 backwards. Over the years there have been many cryptographic algorithms that appeared to require a certain amount of brute force to break, but shortcuts were found that "broke" these algorithms.

So basically, if you use these algorithms you are trusting the people who claim to have evaluated them when they say they couldn't find any shortcuts. You are trusting them to be honest and you are trusting them to be competent. And they could even be both and someone cleverer or luckier might come up with a new way of recasting the problem that makes it easy.

I'm not saying that I know how to do this, or that I know anyone who does. However, I have met a number of people who have known of shortcuts to break many encryption algorithms. Most of these people worked or had worked for NSA. And before that there are famous people before my time who broke "secure" crypto. The most famous example of this is Alan Turing and the people who worked with him at Hut 6 who broke the German enigma cypher system during WWII through a combination of mathematics and special purpose hardware.

The imitation game

The Hut Six story