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A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

letsencrypt.org

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Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#141

I've been working on a new project using ed25519 signatures and discovered they are not quantum resistant.... I went with ed25519 due to possibility of using openssh keys. Any opinion on this choice at the light of this article and other quantum computing news?

Signatures aren't as urgent to replace as encryption keys are. You can wait until someone is about to build a quantum computer, then change all your signatures. Encrypted data is more critical because the NSA's going to store all internet traffic for centuries if it thinks it can decrypt it later.

No, very much no. If store now decrypt later is the problem, then we basically have no problem (Just like what Peter Gutmann argues [2]). The vast, basically all communication over for example TLS need confidentiality in minutes, hours. Not 30-100 years. My bank statement right now, the plans we discuss for the project next year etc.

But what is very important crucial, what makes our digital world including secure communication, web commerce possible is the web of trust - identification and authentication. I'd claim that the important part of TLS including certs is this part. We could by and large not need the confidentiality. But since it costs so comparatively little we can just as well always encrypt too.

You seem to think that changing a certificate is something we can fix in minutes. Globally. The reality is far from that. Esp in things that are not just your browser. Things like network equipment, FW for basically every embedded system, cars, busses. And crucially for critical entities.

These things have long lifespans (decades), often need manual intervention to change certificates (connect a JTAG, serial intercace), possible even replacement. But replacing root certs in all our normal devices - phones, laptops etc are also far from easy and done in minutes. Then you have all digital identification solutions - from ID cards, car fobs, 2FA tokens, passports, credit cards. You may have to replace millions of physical things, even distribute to whole populations.

And back to the web. If we can crack an RSA-2048 key in 24 hours (which is the measure used when guessing we have QC capable enough [1]). We really don't have that many CAs. The times they have had problems have caused problems that have taken days, weeks to trickle down. Having CA issue new rootcerts several times a day isn't viable. So I'd wager that transitioning to PQC safe certificates, authentication isn't something we can wait with. It will take years and huge efforts - not minutes and when the problem hits us.

If you look at time plans for transitioning to PQC from CNSA, EU, UK and others, the area they all list as most critical to complete transition as soon as possible for is SW, FW-signing for infrastructure, embedded systems [1].

So, in reality unless you have a legal responsibility for keeping state secrets then store now, decrypt later is not really your main reason for PQC transitioning. Authentication very much is. Unfortunately most cryptographers by large seems to miss this. And people in uniform have a large saying, influence in the debate. My guess is that this is because gov to a large degree finance a lot of the QC research and they have a different threat model that most of the world. But that is just my guess.

As Gutmann argues, we don't even really know that there even is a viable store now, decrypt later threat. Unless you can pinpoint the exact TLS session that is interesting, you can't store or decrypt all traffic that may be the interesting ones (if we assume that the cost of breaking a single RSA is not zero and takes minutes, seconds. Not 24 hours). And if indeed if TLS and normal key exchange mechanisms, are really used for those juicy messages.

[0] https://globalriskinstitute.org/publication/quantum-threat-t...

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2025/May/30/2003728741/-1/-1/0/CSA...

[2] https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#142
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language (so it's not like reading William Gibson who clearly has no idea and knows it - he's going for the emotional feel not the technology) but they don't understand what's actually going on. OTP is in theory the correct choice if you don't have working symmetric cryptography but in fact the "Quantum computer" ap…

It's worth noting that the above assumes that grover's is optimal for symmetric crypto. There are not that many quantum attacks against symmetric crypto that are better than grover's, so in some sense this is justified. But there are some attacks for particular constructions https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.02836 So there is a risk that there are even more improved attacks that people aren't looking for due to the conventi…

I agree.. Consider Math symbols and physical constants themselves are signs in a humans (or machines) interpretive system. They aren’t the actual thing, and treating them as precise blinds us to alternative interpretations. Conventional wisdom about Grover’s algorithm might be blinding cryptographers. I highly recommend semiotics as a lens peaking through this veil.

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#143
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we take near term to mean “while any of the participants in this thread are still alive”, I think we’re going to be safe for a while. https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf

it's worth mentioning opinions have started to shift away from this. Quantum computing has made quite concrete progress in the last ~2 years. No guarantee this continues, but among people I know it has changed their perspectives from (roughly) similar things as that essay, to thinking we really must transition now.

It’s also because harvest now decrypt later is the main concern.

This means even if you think viable quantum computers are 20 years away, in contexts where HNDL is an issue that means really you should be thinking about this now.

In contexts where that isn’t an issue you can debate whether we have 5 years, 10 years, 20 years or 50 years but in the case of the SSL key exchange we need to think about it now regardless

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language (so it's not like reading William Gibson who clearly has no idea and knows it - he's going for the emotional feel not the technology) but they don't understand what's actually going on. OTP is in theory the correct choice if you don't have working symmetric cryptography but in fact the "Quantum computer" ap…

> But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language (so it's not like reading William Gibson who clearly has no idea and knows it - he's going for the emotional feel not the technology) but they don't understand what's actually going on. That feels a bit harsh when reading a book written in 1992. Shor's algorithm was only invented in 1994. There was no ind…

The communication is clearly inflected by Usenet conventions, but I think that's as forgiveable as the choice to have Banks' Culture starships named using our cultural references like "Just read the Instructions" or "Don't Try This At Home". I don't think we're told it actually is Usenet -- it's just that necessarily light speed comms is very slow compared to the pace of life at this scale so it will feel much like Usenet. So I actually thought this made lots of sense.

It's true that we have no apriori justification for the existence of symmetric cryptography and so in principle somebody might have a constructive proof that you can't do this at all and we're boned. There was no evidence for this when the book was written and there's no evidence for it now, but it's nowhere close to as crazy as the Zones of Thought physics so, sure.

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#145
post #134
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a near term risk we are planning for I'd argue it's closer to a cheap insurance, just in case. Take the encryption of a TLS connection itself, for example: you want to protect against a possible "store now, decrypt later" attack on your connection, 60 years from now, by an attacker with an NSA-level budget. Even if you judge the probability of it happening as "exceedingly unlikely", migrating to a hybrid scheme is…

> as they almost certainly have weaknesses for some of those new PQ schemes already lying around why believe this about PQ schemes vs about pre-existing schemes? Or any other schemes? It's also worth mentioning that it appears that other countries (in particular China) will adopt fundamentally similar schemes. The NSA loves vulnerabilities, but generally only vulnerabilities of a certain type. These are generally ref…

> If America was hoarding vulnerabilities, one might imagine America would have pressured Isreal to keep this secret.

just say no

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#146
post #2

Better encryption sounds good to me in general, but I don't really understand, how we can make quantum safe encryption, when we don't know yet, what capabilities it will have (or if it is possible at all). I am obviously not in the field, but as far as I know, no QC is close of working for a practical purpose(aside quantum research), but to make it practical, it needs a groundbraking brakethrough of some sort. But if…

Bruce Schneier's books explain that there is far more to security than better encryption. Most are implemented incorrectly or used incorrectly.

I also liked the memes. Too bad they died out after he failed with Skein.

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#147
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language (so it's not like reading William Gibson who clearly has no idea and knows it - he's going for the emotional feel not the technology) but they don't understand what's actually going on. OTP is in theory the correct choice if you don't have working symmetric cryptography but in fact the "Quantum computer" ap…

But how do you do the key exchange?

Concern about that makes lots more sense. If your trusted couriers are moving some bits as part of a ratchet mechanism or something I'm onboard. But the volumes involved then are tiny, whereas the story beat is about a large volume of data.

It's the difference between stealing Bearer Bonds which you can notionally insist are arbitrarily valuable despite the modest amount in Die Hard†, and stealing literal Gold Bars in Die Hard with a Vengeance which is silly because we know how valuable each bar is and they're much too heavy for the heist to actually work as depicted.

† Die Hard is set after bearer bonds don't make sense for non-crooks and thus didn't exist for crooks to steal because their tax treatment changed, however the novel Die Hard is based on was set before these tax changes so it did make sense when it was written.

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#149
post #38
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. "Post-quantum" is not a kind of cryptography; it's an attribute of many different kinds of cryptography. SIKE and modular lattices are completely unrelated. SIKE is moon math that genuinely was introduced to mainstream cryptographers as a post-quantum construction. Lattices have been carefully studied for decades; in the 1990s, it was a live discussion whether the successor to RSA was going to be elliptic curves…

Worth mentioning the lattice KEM he backed (NTRU prime) is part of a class of lattice-based assumptions that admitted devastating attacks (though not in the parameter regime relevant to public-key cryptography applications). By this I mean the dense sub lattice attacks on NTRU. He has also repeatedly pointed to (seemingly random) pieces of lattice cryptography and claimed that it is the cause for concern/plausibly wh…

That he backed PQ crypto that turned out to be broken later should be an argument in favor of hybrid (belts-and-suspender) schemes rather than against it. Embarassing behavior amounts to not much more than ad hominems. Hybrid KEMs are a good idea.

Re: A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Chapter 8, available online at https://deepness.trmm.net/c08b/ "Our main cargo is a one-time cryptographic pad. The source is Commercial Security at Sjandra Kei; the destination is the certificants' High colony. It was the usual arrangement: We're carrying a one-third xor of the pad. Independent shippers are carrying the others. At the destination, the three parts would be xor'd together. The result could supply…

Doesn’t mention anything about quantum there though. Symmetric keys are secure enough against a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, but OTP provides information theoretic security. As GGP mentioned AES should be fine as far as we know for the foreseeable future regardless, but for all we know some brilliant cryptographer will in fact find a flaw. With OTP one doesn’t have to worry about even the slightest ch…

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