Encryption security may not be secure anymore, if a breakthrough being touted as ‘possibly the biggest event in computer science and financial services for 50 years’ is proved correct. The breakthrough by students at the University of Toronto allows huge integer numbers to be factored quicker than previously thought possible, meaning encrypted files can be broken into in as little as ‘100 hours compute time’. All current banking transactions, digital signatures, network communications, credit and debit card transactions, not to mention personal communications on platforms such as WhatsApp, use encryption. We have always been told that encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. How did they do it? The University of Toronto academic press release: AES-256 Encryption Possibly Now Broken After New Method To Speedily Factor Integers Greater Than 128 Bits Found Mathematics Dept./Computer Science Dept. Factoring of large integers using estimation of weak intermediate key points along a quadratic curve has been discovered by Dept. of Computer Science PhD candidates xxxxxx x. xxxxxxxx xxxxxx and Dept. of Mathematics MSc candidate xx xx xxxxx and his [...]