There's a general question among cryptographers: How far ahead of the general public is the NSA? The answer: We don't know. Interestingly, back in the early 90

There's a general question among cryptographers: How far ahead of the general public is the NSA? The answer: We don't know. Interestingly, back in the early 90s they were maybe 15ish years ahead of us. Decisions they made back then weren't understood until the 2000s. However, the gap may have been closed somewhat as of late. The public found flaws in SHA-1 (an algorithm by the NSA) in the 2000s that we believe the NSA didn't actually know about yet. A general note on cryptography security margins (not really an answer, sorry, just some thoughts): The margins are designed to take into account future advances in technology. The community chooses the problems with the most conservative, best understood parameters, and that seem to be the least-likely to experience a break-through. As well, it tends to pick things with margins like "40+ years", meaning that even if we continue to improve our attacks and computing power at the same rate we have been, it is generally expected that it'll take at least 40 years before we're good enough to break it. (Obviously the experts turn out to be wrong sometimes.) The community thinks very long term and tries to avoid ever picking anything that is very possible to be broken in just 20 years. It takes (in rough terms) at least 5 just to get through the review process and get the algorithm into standards, another 5 to get it into wide-spread usage, and another 5 to transition away from it. So a very popular crypto algorithm probably needs at least 15 years from its introduction run its life cycle, assuming theres no lull of happiness where it's just existing as a secure, commonly used standard. So there's little point in introducing any algorithm that is anything but a very low likelihood of being broken in 20, because it would spend only a fraction of it's lifespan serving as a widely-used, secure standard. Last point: Breaks tend to be slow, and big breaks are usually smelled very far in advance. When we're 10 or so years out from a big break, we have a good chance of knowing it and we can start to transition away. Someone 20 years ahead of us may very well only find big breaks just before we start to migrate away from the algorithm. Due to that, we might optimistically (optimism has no place in crypto, I know ;-)) think that an adversary 20 years ahead of us has relatively minimal advantage.