These flaws keep all encryption from becoming an absolute, although the degree of weakness can be lessened as a result.

Many types of encryption can be weakened by optimization and short cuts to the operation, which yield faster speed. Cryptography is a different form of computing which works against the grain of the teachings a typical computer programmer would receive: slower is better. By attempting more possibilities in duration of time, a slower cryptographic process will yield fewer attempts at breaking it than a method that is considerably faster. More attempts to break in equate to a better chance of guessing the key.

Some methods of cryptography have been bypassed ENTIRELY, allowing a straight conversion. In these cases, classified as vulnerabilities of the Read Restricted severity, the encrypted information can easily be converted to plaintext as if there was no encryption.

Cryptography typically was made for the time it was created. If the encryption takes too long to compute, it won't work with most applications. As one of the “original” benchmarks, DES (Digital Encryption Standard) was expected to perform a single “hash” to validate a user's password on a PDP-11 computer in the late 1970s. The PDP-11 was considered one of the fastest computers of its time. Nowadays, a reasonably priced personal computer can perform 15,000 of these comparisons in the same second.