[quote][b]Posted by:[/b] sawnose Yep, for certain topics like RSA cryptography. And that was the first big algorithm discovered/created, and it's somewhat surprising that in the 25 years or so since that first big leap, nothing has surpassed it.[/quote]It's actually quite interesting why this hasn't happened. Although RSA does underpin the rest of cryptography in computing, that's all it does, underpin. It's used once for secure key exchange or identification and then left alone for as long as you can trust the keys exchanged. So, if RSA ever comes close to being broken, we can just make the bit length of the prime numbers used infeasibly large. Compared to, say, AES, which has to be employed over and over again in realtime on every bit of data, RSA is used once to encapsulate one relatively small piece of text and exchange it, again only once. So, why bother improving it? At the end of the day, unless it's found to have gaping security holes, any "better" algorithms are only going to be a linear improvement, simply increasing the bit length gives you exponential improvements in security.