It seems that our money might not be as secure we thought it was. Two students found that the cryptographic techniques used by IBM in manufacturing their ATMs is a lot easier to brute-force crack than previously thought. In fact, a brute force technique can crack the key used for a transmission in under 25 hours on a cheap PC.

The most interesting thing about this is that not only have IBM known about this for two years, but they continue to ignore it, stating that “In the real world, there are too many physical safeguards and authority protections for such an attack to be successful.” Sorry, IBM, you really can't expect us to believe that you've got armed guards posted along all the phone lines between your ATMs and your servers.

It is interesting to note that a system that was once considered uncrackable in a lifetime is now easily compromised in a single day. Perhaps this is the future of all public key encryption techniques — to be outdated as we build faster computers with superior algorithms.