How long would it take to break a 32 bit key / encryption

Question

I was actually wondering... How long would it take to crack/brute force a 32 bit key/encryption and a 16 bit key/encryptions respectively?

I’m voting to close this question because it is better suited for crypto.stackexchange.com — Raghav Sood, Oct 09 '20 at 03:18
And why did you actually do that... It's not ethical in any way... Don't you know that all Stackexchange websites are interwoven in a way that anyone can find an answer in just a search on any of their platforms... So what is actually your intention? For this question to be closed irrelevantly because you think it's "Suitable" for a section of this platform... I'm PISSED. — Dave Kent, Oct 09 '20 at 07:17
@Dave Kent Please stay polite. We're not telling off, and people are even answering your question regardless. But this question is unrelated to Bitcoin, and you should post it on crypto.stackexchange.con - you'll get much better answers there too. — Pieter Wuille, Oct 09 '20 at 07:31

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 08 '20 at 23:52

2

Way too fast. It's only 4,294,967,296 combinations for 32 bit and 65,536 for a 16 bit. I assume it can be cracked in seconds/minutes by a high-grade consumer laptop.

The resources required for a brute-force attack grow exponentially with increasing key size, not linearly.

I would also suggest reading the article about breaking mnemonic seed where author had to calculate SHA-256, SHA-512, RIPEMD-160, EC Addition, EC Multiplication in every iteration and he was able to check ~143,000 mnemonics per second.

answered Oct 08 '20 at 23:52

Tony Sanak

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By high grade; what should be the criteria of the laptop? And are there any specific numbers in minutes or seconds that we're looking at? – Dave Kent Oct 09 '20 at 00:53
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This depends far more on exactly what encryption scheme is being used than on the CPU. – Pieter Wuille Oct 09 '20 at 06:20
One can say the encryption scheme I'm going with is actually brute force. Does this still change the speed at which the bits are processed? – Dave Kent Oct 09 '20 at 07:10
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That makes no sense. Brute force is a mechanism for breaking encryption. You still haven't revealed anything about the scheme you're breaking. – Pieter Wuille Oct 09 '20 at 07:32
"article about breaking mnemonic" There is no encryption in BIP-39 – Coding Enthusiast Oct 09 '20 at 10:30

How long would it take to break a 32 bit key / encryption

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