AES attack discovers keys faster than thought possible

Researchers from Microsoft, together with those from a university in Belgium, have come up with a new method of attacking AES-128, -192 and -256. It's called a biclique attack and it's capable of discovering the encryption keys many times more quickly than can be done via a brute force attack. The good news is that the attacks are said to be of "high computational complexity" and AES-128 is still considered to be strong enough for most applications. You can read more about this here:

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-attack-finds-aes-private-keys-several-times-faster-brute-force-081911