Assume that over some time frame a crypto solution (the entire system matters as it's very easy to use encryption insecurely) will be compromised. You are esse

Assume that over some time frame a crypto solution (the entire system matters as it's very easy to use encryption insecurely) will be compromised. You are essentially buying yourself time. So the question is how much time do you need to buy yourself. Ok, so even if you select a key length of something very large which depends not only on bytes of the key but also the encryption algorithm as well. For a 4096 bit key that would be 1.0443888814131525066917527107166e+1233 combinations, assuming someone tried to brute force this at 100000 checks per second (a low estimate) it would take roughly 1.655867708988382335571652572800330388413185326368886003... × 10^1220 years to crack on average assuming the birthday paradox. 2^4096 / 2 / 100000 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365 So that's a freaking long time to keep that data secure. Even radically scaling up the brute force attack across the entire world would be akin to boiling the oceans. (Not going to do out the cpu/watt/check number calculation to determine how much energy it would actually take compared to boiling the oceans...) So are you safe? No because starting in WWII very smart mathematicians were finding ways to crack the algorithms and find patterns and holes in the encryption solutions that made the search space orders of magnitude smaller. So the best thing we can do is select well attacked, well researched but still secure systems, use a good key length and pray (I am not a religious man). Edit: If you wish to be truly paranoid (don't recommend it), most of the important crypto research has been done by state organizations, this is how AES was selected from a group of submitted designs to NIST. Conversely there are few still secure and well researched algorithms besides AES out there, (Elliptic Curve basically, but those designs are under patents so not widely available etc) Edit 2: Also wikipedia is a great starting point for understanding, but is not always complete. Still haven't seen it probably explain initialization vector or nounces before. Oh and one last thing http://xkcd.com/538/ http://xkcd.com/538/ See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_search https://blogs.oracle.com/dcb/entry/zfs_boils_the_ocean_consumes https://blogs.oracle.com/dcb/entry/zfs_boils_the_ocean_consu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography