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The principles are the same — it's just harder to find collisions for larger digest sizes. (Although bugs in sha-1 add an interesting wrinkle to the discussion.)

In fact one could argue that encryption without requiring infinite bandwidth or computation requires finite difficulty in math puzzles.

So our current approach to encryption is fundamentally vulnerable to (vastly) more powerful adversary computers. Only things like quantum cryptography break free of that limitation, by changing the ground rules.



Algorithmic cryptography depends on a computation time approaching infinity for perfect security. Quantum cryptography depends on a data transmission rate approaching zero for perfect security. Either way, perfect security takes forever.




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