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As we already know, with the rising power of machines and new technologies like quantum computers today's methods of encryption might be much faster to crack in the future.

With locally saved data you could always safely erase it and write it again with a stronger encryption method.

However, I'm wondering what will happen to network traffic or other encrypted data that might be accessed publicly. If an attacker captures network traffic or a copy of other data today, will it be likely that in some years they can revise and decrypt this data? Doesn't this mean that today's encryption protects us only for now and in future attackers could find out everything about the past when they had been able to gather encrypted data? What strategies exist for mitigation?

I want to apologize in case I am making wrong assumptions. IT security is not my expertise.

BooleanAssange
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  • The strategy is to decide for how long the data need to be kept secret and then follow the recommendations of which key length and algorithms should be used for protecting these data. See https://www.keylength.com/ for recommendations from various agencies and standards. – Steffen Ullrich Jun 27 '21 at 17:40
  • See https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html for some interesting reading on this subject, including the feasibility of cracking 256-bit keys in the future, even with quantum computers, in particular, "*...brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space*". – mti2935 Jun 27 '21 at 20:05

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