encryption questions

Hello group,
I'm new to encryption and I have a couple of questions that will seem elementary to those of you who know all about this. Hope somebody will answer anyway. Here goes:

*. I've seen a lot of discussions about *28-bit vs. 256-bit encryption. Some say *28 is strong enough, others say it isn't. If I use a *5-character alphanumeric password with *28-bit encryption, what are the chances it can be cracked?

2. Speaking of passwords, what is the difference between a password and a key?

Thanx in advance
Chet

[QUOTE=chester;267**]Hello group,
I'm new to encryption and I have a couple of questions that will seem elementary to those of you who know all about this. Hope somebody will answer anyway. Here goes:

*. I've seen a lot of discussions about *28-bit vs. 256-bit encryption. Some say *28 is strong enough, others say it isn't. If I use a *5-character alphanumeric password with *28-bit encryption, what are the chances it can be cracked?

2. Speaking of passwords, what is the difference between a password and a key?

Thanx in advance
Chet[/QUOTE]

I`m also a newbie in this matter but I made some research and found following answer for the second question:

"These terms, which are entirely different in cryptography, are often mixed up. [B]Password[/B] - is that very word, word combination or meaningless character set which we enter answering some programs' request. However, these programs do not use passwords for encryption, they just get keys from them. [B]Encryption keys[/B] are bit strings (0 or *) of different length, 40, 64 and *28-bit keys are most widely used. So, to decrypt anything you need to know either password or the key itself."

For your first question I can tell you that, at the moment, the best encrypting algorithms that are available and standardized today are ECC P-52* and AES-256. I don`t know how easy it can be to crack a *28-bit encryption key but surely is much harder to crack the 256- bit one!

Cheers! :)