Comment by retrac
8 months ago
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today
The gold standard 30 years ago was PGP. RSA 1024 or 2048 for key exchange. IDEA symmetric cipher.
This combination is, as far as I am aware, still practically cryptographically secure. Though maybe not in another 10 or 20 years. (RSA 1024 is not that far from brute forcing with classical machines.)
I was wondering exactly how hard factoring RSA-1024 would be today and found this stackexchange answer: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/111828
In summary, it estimates the cost at $3.5 billion using commodity hardware, and I'd expect a purpose-built system could bring that cost down by an order of magnitude.