I’m not talking in particular about encryption, but security as a whole. Are there any security measures that can be put in place to protect data and/or a system that can withstand even a hypothetical amount of resources being pitted against it over a hypothetical amount of time?
I think the answer is no, but I thought I’d double check before saying this out loud to people because I’m no security expert.
UPDATE: I should point out, I’m not asking this because I need to implement something. It’s idle curiosity. I should also mention that I’m ok dealing with hypotheticals here. Feel free to bring things like quantum computing into the equation if there’s any relevance.
The One-time pad is such an encryption technique: it’s fundamentally secure against brute force, in other words, information-theoretically secure. If you don’t have the key, it cannot be “broken” regardless of what computation power you throw at it. The trick is that it’s impossible to distinguish the correct answer from all other possible answers, because every answer is equally likely.
Read more on Wikipedia
Unfortunately the one-time pad is almost useless in practice, because the key must be as long as your plaintext, the key may never be re-used, and it has to be random. All of this means that you can’t derive the key from a memorable password, so you need a secure storage method for the key itself. But if you can already secure a massive key, you might as well put your plaintext there without encryption.