Decently put together cryptography is already virtually unbreakable, at least until the get their hands on a usable quantum computer, so at least 5 or 10 years
This really only should apply to asymmetric cryptosystems like RSA and elliptic curve crypto that depend on the difficulty of prime factorization. (edit: there are ECC and lattice based asymmetric cryptosystems which will almost certainly not be able to be cracked by quantum computers, like derivatives of McEliece encryption, they're just not widely implemented despite having been around since before encryption was widely adopted on the Web, mainly because they have really big key sizes that would have been a lot less feasible to pass around on DSL)
Property implemented symmetric encryption algorithms today will still require bruteforcing most likely, and quantum computers will be pretty limited in terms of processing time so I doubt they'll be put to that task for the most part.
As long as that's true:
Another idea was a breakthrough in cryptography makings comms be completely anonymous, giving insurgent movements a more even playing field.
@Kestrel I would be 500% be in prison right now if existing technologies were able to crack modern cryptography (edit: and defeat the anonymity models of existing garlic & onion routers). And even when prime factorization is feasible in a human lifetime, I should still be alright because symmetric encryption should still be secure at that point (and no, I'm not dumb, I didn't rely on transmitting symmetric keys via asymmetrically encrypted channels).
This really only should apply to asymmetric cryptosystems like RSA and elliptic curve crypto that depend on the difficulty of prime factorization. (edit: there are ECC and lattice based asymmetric cryptosystems which will almost certainly not be able to be cracked by quantum computers, like derivatives of McEliece encryption, they're just not widely implemented despite having been around since before encryption was widely adopted on the Web, mainly because they have really big key sizes that would have been a lot less feasible to pass around on DSL)
Property implemented symmetric encryption algorithms today will still require bruteforcing most likely, and quantum computers will be pretty limited in terms of processing time so I doubt they'll be put to that task for the most part.
As long as that's true:
@Kestrel I would be 500% be in prison right now if existing technologies were able to crack modern cryptography (edit: and defeat the anonymity models of existing garlic & onion routers). And even when prime factorization is feasible in a human lifetime, I should still be alright because symmetric encryption should still be secure at that point (and no, I'm not dumb, I didn't rely on transmitting symmetric keys via asymmetrically encrypted channels).