> 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.

I created an account just to chime in on this.

In short: horseshit.

Look, cryptology is a tricky field, but when it comes to standards development (especially OPEN standards development, without government intervention), it's mostly been hits, not misses. While there are occasional breaks and busts, the fact is, most of the trusted algorithms have remained trustworthy-- lasting through their designated lifespans, and often a lot longer. Many of the algorithms that you hear are "insecure" aren't really insecure due to any math advances; they have simply fallen victim to their already-known limitations, or are "insecure" when used in specific ways.

For instance, look at the Blowfish block cipher. Blowfish was designed and released almost thirty years ago. Its current biggest security issue is not some tricky biclique attack that allows key recovery on a desktop computer or something. The problem is that the block size is 64 bits, and in modern contexts, that's just too small-- networks shuffle enough bits around these days that a 32-gigabyte encrypted transfer is suddenly a realistic use case, and there are known attacks related to that. 64 bits was fine at the time, and the block size was a known limitation of the algorithm (birthday attacks are well-understood). The algorithm didn't fall; we outgrew the use case.

Going back even further: DES was released nearly FORTY-FIVE years ago. It was released with a 56-bit key, which was known at the time to likely be in brute-force range for certain Nation State Adversaries. It has the same block-size issue as Blowfish. But it's actually stood up to cryptanalysis pretty well, given the power of the attacks that have been developed since then. Triple-DES, properly used, is plenty secure for lots of applications-- it's still even promulgated as a standard algorithm for a lot of financial industry systems.

More germane to modern encryption practice, AES was standardized nearly 20 years ago, and has been studied for even longer. It's still a solid algorithm today. There are a few implementation caveats if you want to avoid things like cache timing issues, but the algorithm itself is holding up very nicely to mathematical advances-- the best known mathematical attacks drop the security levels by 1 to 4 bits, depending on key size, which is... well, it's worse than 0 bits, but it's certainly nothing to worry about. AES has been integrated into processor designs, it's used to protect US government information classified up to TOP SECRET, and it's supported by nearly every cryptographic suite out there-- because of all of that, the algorithm has remained a significant subject of ongoing research, and it has stood up to the scrutiny beautifully.

Cryptography is always advancing, and sometimes algorithms do fall to mathematical breakthroughs (RC4 has been battered pretty badly, for instance, and SHA-1 is clearly dead now). But for the most part, cryptologists try their damnedest to know the limitations of their algorithms, and they're pretty up front about them.

I'll also point out: cryptologists are aware that there's risk associated with mathematical advances, and they hedge their bets. Note that there is now a SHA-3 standard. That's not because the SHA-2 algorithms are dead. It's because, while we're pretty sure they're secure, the SHA-2 algorithms are cut from the same mathematical cloth as SHA-1 (they use the Merkle-Damgard construction). SHA-3 was standardized with the explicit purpose of adding diversity to the pool of standardized algorithms. NIST is currently running a post-quantum public-key standardization effort, and has made it very clear from the start that they'd like to select multiple "winners" from multiple categories. Part of this is to allow flexibility for different use cases (key size / message size / performance trade-offs vary wildly for different classes of algorithms). But another part is preventing a complete disaster if one class of algorithms is broken (either classically or with a quantum computer).