[2] These improvements eventually place the capabilities once available only to the NSA within the reach of a skilled individual,[3] so in practice there are only two levels of cryptographic security, "cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files" (Bruce Schneier).
[2] The strong cryptography algorithms have high security strength, for practical purposes usually defined as a number of bits in the key.
[5][needs update] Demonstrating the resistance of any cryptographic scheme to attack is a complex matter, requiring extensive testing and reviews, preferably in a public forum.
Many real-life systems turn out to be weak when the strong cryptography is not used properly, for example, random nonces are reused[6] A successful attack might not even involve algorithm at all, for example, if the key is generated from a password, guessing a weak password is easy and does not depend on the strength of the cryptographic primitives.
It is typically the case that use of a quality cipher is very efficient, while breaking it requires an effort many orders of magnitude larger - making cryptanalysis so inefficient and impractical as to be effectively impossible.
The usual sense in which this term is (loosely) used, is in reference to a particular attack, brute force key search — especially in explanations for newcomers to the field.
There will always be uncertainty as advances (e.g., in cryptanalytic theory or merely affordable computer capacity) may reduce the effort needed to successfully use some attack method against an algorithm.
[18] The export control in the US historically uses two tracks:[19] Since the original applications of cryptography were almost exclusively military, it was placed on the munitions list.
[20] This classification had its obvious drawbacks: a major bank is arguably just as systemically important as a military installation,[20] and restriction on publishing the strong cryptography code run against the First Amendment, so after experimenting in 1993 with the Clipper chip (where the US government kept special decryption keys in escrow), in 1996 almost all cryptographic items were transferred to the Department of Commerce.
European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) holds the opinion that the backdoors are not efficient for the legitimate surveillance, yet pose great danger to the general digital security.
The efforts of this group are not entirely coordinated: for example, the 2019 demand for Facebook not to implement end-to-end encryption was not supported by either Canada or New Zealand, and did not result in a regulation.
[22][23][24][note 1] The decree of No.313 issued in 2012 further amended previous ones allowing to produce and distribute products with embedded cryptosystems and requiring no license as such, even though it declares some restrictions.