The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable too. IMHO there is no level of encryption that can't be cracked given enough time and desire. Right now I would say this type of communication would be very secure, but to think it will always stay secure would be foolish.
True, but... the more people who routinely encrypt their communications, the more likely they won't bother trying to decrypt any particular one.
There's always the possibility that the gov procured some mega power computer that they would be willing to have run for days/weeks/months just to crack one particular encryption. It's also possible they got hold of some mathematician was able to invent/discover a way of cracking codes with a simple algorythm, which would be an "I found the holy grail" achievement. If you can easily find the only 2 very, very large prime numbers, which when multiplied together get a much bigger number, without doing lots of trial and error divisions, then that would be you.
Probably the biggest potential vunerability though is a computer or phone that's been hacked with some kind of spyware. Encryption wouldn't mean squat then.
IMHO there is no level of encryption that can't be cracked given enough time and desire.
256-bit AES is virtually unbreakable. A 256-bit cypher offers 2^256 of possible keys. If you had the computer horsepower to test 1 trillion keys every second (using a typical brute force attack) then it would take 3.67^52 years to exhaust 1% of the total keyspace.
There have been contests to break encryption. Check out distributed.net
The results from their 64-bit challenge are as follows:
It took 1,757 days for 331,252 people to test 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys. The peak rate was 270,147,024 kkeys/sec. The equivalent computer horsepower to check that many keys was 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines.
They started another contest in 2002 to break a 72-bit key. It's still going.