171–175 of 175 posts
We are truly living in a science fiction future where quantum code cracking is not a remote possibility but a near term risk we are planning for. In Vernor Vinge's novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" one of the most valuable commodities were one time pads that are physically transported to communication nodes to enable unbreakable communication. The pads are split into three pieces that are XORed to create the actual pad to…
All your Bitcoin are belong to Us?
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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
these have always been an issue, and were the motivation for starting the NIST standardization in ~2016. My point is more that recent developments in quantum computing have caused many cryptographers to go from "we should do this so people are secure if progress happens in the decades from now" to "this may be a near-term issue, and we should prioritize transition for user safety issues". You can read some about this…
More money for quantum research increases the possibility of breakthroughs, while simultaneously more money for PQC research means more practical, reliable post-quantum cryptosystems that can actually be implemented.
End result is fairly quickly you go from "this is a problem for the fairly distant future and ECDHE is fine" to "we should implement PQ key exchange basically right now"
nsa and eu pushing for replacement of the reliable algorithms with unproven and very likely backdoored post-quantum algorithms, when there is no real threat at all, is highly suspicious.
> all the post-quantum algorithms implemented by OpenSSH are "hybrids" that combine a post-quantum algorithm with a classical algorithm. For example mlkem768x25519-sha256 combines ML-KEM, a post-quantum key agreement scheme, with ECDH/x25519, a classical key agreement algorithm that was formerly OpenSSH's preferred default. This ensures that the combined, hybrid algorithm is no worse than the previous best classical algorithm, even if the post-quantum algorithm turns out to be completely broken by future cryptanalysis.
no quantum threat. keep ed25519 and rsa, they are fine.
Nation states have been pouring billions into QC. It's hard to collect the varous announcements into clean figures, but rough estimates are that the US has allocated ~$5B to QC computation research, the EU (via the EU itself, and individual member states) have allocated more (closer to ~$10B-15B), and China has allocated a similar amount (again in the ~$10B range). Industry quantum computing has made precipitous prog…
the quantum industry in reality: "Using Shor’s algorithm, the largest integer factored into primes is 15" :)))
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"Intuition" about how cryptography works is notoriously bad. Many intuitive things about cryptography are false, and many true things about cryptography are non-intuitive. For this reason it is difficult to seriously discuss cryptography when people are vaguely referring to what they intuitively hope to achieve, framed in terms of concrete constructions that are not secure. This is also completely ignoring that desig…
I don't disagree, but I think the folks who know this ought to remember the lay person perspective and try to address it more concretely. Rather than rejecting the framing because they (we) aren't fluent in your jargon, provide a more constructive hint... E.g. "You may be thinking the symmetric cipher key is simply encrypted with the asymmetric cipher and concatenated to the bulk message. But, to mitigate known crypt…