> But aren't most widely adopted algorithms decently future proof?
Absolutely not.
The algorithms rely on assumptions, and they're not at all future-proof.
One is about certain classes of mathematical problems being hard (in RSA, it's factoring numbers). We don't know whether they're hard (there's no proof; it's an "open problem").
Another is that random numbers selected in encryption are uniformly distributed and unpredictable. (In RSA, you pick two large prime numbers, p and q. If two people share a number, say my p is the same as your q, then we're both screwed. This particular assumption has been already been violated a bunch of times in the past twenty years; from the Debian OpenSSL thing, to the Android/Bitcoin thing.)
There are many other assumptions (Certificate Authorities can be trusted, etc.) that a paranoid person would have to worry about.
I think the new hotness is elliptic curve cryptography (e.g. ECDSA), but I don't understand it well enough to know if it's substantially better than the RSA implementations that are currently popular. I'd say what we have now is like a lock on the door -- it's enough to prevent the neighbour's kid from getting in, but not enough to stop a determined lockpick or the government.
Absolutely not.
The algorithms rely on assumptions, and they're not at all future-proof.
One is about certain classes of mathematical problems being hard (in RSA, it's factoring numbers). We don't know whether they're hard (there's no proof; it's an "open problem").
Another is that random numbers selected in encryption are uniformly distributed and unpredictable. (In RSA, you pick two large prime numbers, p and q. If two people share a number, say my p is the same as your q, then we're both screwed. This particular assumption has been already been violated a bunch of times in the past twenty years; from the Debian OpenSSL thing, to the Android/Bitcoin thing.)
There are many other assumptions (Certificate Authorities can be trusted, etc.) that a paranoid person would have to worry about.
I think the new hotness is elliptic curve cryptography (e.g. ECDSA), but I don't understand it well enough to know if it's substantially better than the RSA implementations that are currently popular. I'd say what we have now is like a lock on the door -- it's enough to prevent the neighbour's kid from getting in, but not enough to stop a determined lockpick or the government.