International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Sensitive electronic data may be required to remain confidential for long periods of time. Yet encryption under a computationally secure cryptosystem cannot provide a guarantee of long term confidentiality, due to potential advances in computing power or cryptanalysis. Long term confidentiality is ensured by information theoretically secure ciphers, but at the expense of impractical key agreement and key management.

We overview known methods to alleviate these problems, whilst retaining some form of information theoretic security relevant for long term confidentiality.