I just finished reading Simon Singh’s The Code Book, and I got the impression that PGP was basically uncrackable, and more or less always will be. However, the book was written 20 years ago, so, is this still true?
In: Technology
When we design crypto systems like PGP and SSL we do so assuming that computers will get faster and vulnerabilities will get found. So we make them modular so that we can upgrade the modules one by one and still retain backwards compatibility. So the PGP version used 20 years ago is no longer considered uncrackable, although it does hold up very well. However the modern versions are using encryption algorithms that were not even invented back then and typically use key sizes that were unheard of back then. They still use the same principles and message formats but that is where the comparison ends.
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