Reply #26: You may not be up on the latest encryption technology then

[14thColony]

I'm willing to bet my experience is far more recent that yours (as in less than a year old) -- there are open-source encryptions freely available that even the NSA has admitted are mathematically impossible to break in any realistic amount of time. By realistic amount they mean on the order of billions of years.

This FAQ from the PGP website (www.pgp.net) states it pretty well:
Q: Can't you break PGP by trying all of the possible keys?
A: This is one of the first questions that people ask when they are first introduced to cryptography. They do not understand the size of the problem. For the IDEA encryption scheme, a 128 bit key is required. Any one of the 2128 possible combinations would be legal as a key, and only that one key would successfully decrypt the message. Let's say that you had developed a special purpose chip that could try a billion keys per second. This is far beyond anything that could really be developed today. Let's also say that you could afford to throw a billion such chips at the problem at the same time. It would still require over 10,000,000,000,000 years to try all of the possible 128 bit keys. That is something like a thousand times the age of the known universe! While the speed of computers continues to increase and their cost decrease at a very rapid pace, it will probably never get to the point that IDEA could be broken by the brute force attack.

And 128 bit is considered outdated now. I use 256 bit on my computer, and up to 512 bit is available.. I'm not sure this space would be big enough for all the zeros to show how many years it would take for a brute force attack to work on a properly-built 512 bit key.

And before you fall back to the last-ditch "but...but..." of the mysterious "back doors", there is no such thing in any open-code algorithm. If there were, the thousands of geeks in the worldwide crypto community who pore over every line of code in a new algorithm hoping to be the one to spot "the flaw" would have found them by now. Hell, one pair in Japan got their names in lights for finding a "flaw" in the Twofish algorithm that MIGHT reduce the brute force cracking time to only a few hundred million years! Yippee!

When the first quantum computer rolls off the assembly line, the current algorithms are dead meat. Until then, they're effectively unbreakable as long as your password isn't "password" or something asinine like that.

Edited for an instance of dyslexic sentence structure.