Comment by immibis

9 days ago

You're also assuming nobody finds a fundamental flaw in AES that allows data to be decrypted without knowing the key and much faster than brute force. It's pretty likely there isn't one, but a tiny probability multiplied by a massive impact can still land on the side of "don't do it".

I'm not. It's just that the math behind AES is very fundamental and incredibly solid compared to a lot of other (asymmetric) cryptographic schemes in use today. Calling the chances of it tiny instead of nearly nonexistent sabotages almost all risk assessments. Especially if it then overshadows other parts of that assessment (like data loss). Even if someone found "new math" and it takes very optimistically 60 years, of what value is that data then? It's not an useful risk assessment if you assess it over infinite time.

But you could also go with something like OTP and then it's actually fundamentally unbreakable. If the data truly is that important, surely double the storage cost would also be worth it.