Re: What are the chances of this encrytion being broken?

On 24/03/2025 21:33, hal@invalid.com wrote:

And - I am not speaking of crypto for mass use. Only for personal use,
wherein one *can* make it useful and secure.

No. You can't. Even if you are an expert.
You might have a whole bunch of experts trying to break it, at which point you lose.
It's known as Schneier's law.
NSA employ more experts than anyone else (except maybe Russia or China). They are the biggest employer of mathematicians in the US. And they have very big computers.
Peter Fairbrother.
Schneier's Law:
"Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard.
What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis.
And the only way to prove that is to subject the algorithm to years of analysis by the best cryptographers around."
Unfortunately Schneier was a little wrong: years of cryptanalysis by people who keep their results from you don't help you any, and even years of public cryptanalysis don't actually "prove" anything.