How difficult is it to break into TrueCrypt or PGP?
Very difficult, in fact for all practical purposes, it is considered impossible. In most cases, the weakest link will be your passphrase, or being compromised by a hardware key-logger through not having good security on your desktop. From time to time non-expert net users make speculative suggestions that the American intelligence agencies have already cracked these programs. FUD – Fear, Unease, Despair. Probably put out by these self same agencies to try and detract you from using these programs. Cryptanalysts are certain that these modern programs with large key sizes of around 256 bits are impossible to crack into with todays technology, or even whatever is on the horizon. Even with the future of quantum computers, which should be able to factor very large primes very quickly, this may well affect PGP but not TrueCrypt. The likely weakest link will be your passphrase. Your passphrase should be long. Every extra character you enter makes a dictionary search for the right phrase twice
