alt Hacker NewsI am not an expert, but while you are correct that a fast enough traditional computer (or a parallel enough computer) could brute force a 128 bit key, the amount of improvement required would dwarf what we have already experienced over the last 40 years, and is likely physically impossible without some major fundamental change in how computers work.
Compute has seen in the ballpark of a 5-10 orders of magnitude increase over the last 40 years in terms of instructions per second. We would need an additional 20-30 orders of magnitude increase to make it even close to achievable with brute force in a reasonable time frame. That isn’t happening with how we make computers today.
> That isn’t happening with how we make computers today.
Keep here in mind that computers today have features approaching the size of a single atom, switching frequencies where the time to cross a single chip from one end to the other is becoming multiple cycles, and power densities that require us to operate at the physical limits of heat transfer for matter that exists at ambient conditions.
We can squeeze it quite a bit further, sure. But anything like 20-30 orders of magnitude is just laughable even with an infinite supply of unobtanium and fairy dust.