> could you elaborate on why encryption algorithms don't rely on the fact that brute force is physically not meaningful I didn't mean that the infeasability of

> could you elaborate on why encryption algorithms don't rely on the fact that brute force is physically not meaningful I didn't mean that the infeasability of brute forcing an encrypted text is not useful, I was rather suggesting that it is precisely the definition of encryption. I was trying to differentiate between: 1. Using brute force method to convert an encrypted text to the original text without considering the encryption method. This is an inherent property of encryption, and does not pose a problem as you can scale up encrypted values to make brute-forcing infeasible on the fast computers * 2. Breaking the algorithm instead. > As the example you mentioned, the problem becomes solvable in polynomial time I think the issue in the example is not that the computing methods changed, but that the particular algorithm we use for encryption (prime factorization) has a polynomial solution on those computers. The point is that this shift in computing does not break all the encryption algorithms, there are other algorithms you can use that don't have a known solution (yet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice-based_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice-based_cryptography. * All of this is assuming that everyone has access to the same class of computers. Obviously if someone gets their hands on a drastically faster computer while everyone else is still using smaller keys/prime numbers, then you have a problem.