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France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

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Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#51

Post by dylan604 »

pixl97 wrote: post #48
dylan604 wrote: post #38

From TFA: "The policy reflects growing concern about Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) attacks, in which adversaries intercept and store encrypted communications today with the intention of decrypting them once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) becomes available." Once it gets to be "later" where the harvest data is able to be decrypted, I guess will have decent enough LLMs to summarize all of that…

I mean we have decent enough LLMs and algorithms to classify it pretty easily now, much less the future. Just getting context information on who or what the data is narrows down a lot of what you want to look at.

If that were true, they wouldn't need to store it for ever

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#53

Post by vitally3643 »

dylan604 wrote: post #51
pixl97 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we have decent enough LLMs and algorithms to classify it pretty easily now, much less the future. Just getting context information on who or what the data is narrows down a lot of what you want to look at.

If that were true, they wouldn't need to store it for ever

They need to store it because the technology to decrypt it does not yet exist.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#54

Post by dredmorbius »

kibwen wrote: post #44
dredmorbius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of diligence in properly utilising and applying security measures strongly suggests that QC will in fact provide positive utility even if viable PQC countermeasures are developed and deployed. From yesterday's posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983610 > (my comment on the Romanian land registry hacking thread).

I'm afraid I don't see how the linked comment demonstrates the positive utility of QC.

The link shows that well-established security practices are often not followed, even by those who really should damned well know better.

Which is to say: even when PQC mitigations against QC are available, I expect a target-rich environment for QC attackers.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#55

Post by pseudohadamard »

jmward01 wrote: post #11
tsimionescu wrote: post #8

I'm very curious how much people will look back on this frenzy of PQC migration panic by 2050 when, my bet, there still won't be any remotely viable QCs. The decade plus of even slower TLS negotiation that this will bring in the name of "security", after so much time spent previously on improving encrypted connection latency, will seem quite comical, at least.

You prepare for the 9.0 earthquake that can happen once in 500 years because it is a 9.0 earthquake and if you haven't prepared your society is dead, not because you think it will most likely happen in your lifetime.

This isn't preparing for earthquakes, which are a real thing and happen all the time. No-one has ever achieved any crypto result with a "quantum computer" after 20+ years and billions of dollars spent, and there's no sign they will either.

So this isn't preparing for earthquakes, this is preparing for fairies and elves.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#56

Post by semi-extrinsic »

nemo wrote: post #46
kibwen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, we can imagine other use cases for quantum computers. But just because something could be useful doesn't mean it will be developed; the cost still needs to be surmountable.

Logistics companies are using hybrid QC now from D-Wave Systems. Quantum computing is currently in use in the real world. There's already physics simulations running on QC hardware beyond the capacities of classical computing, QuEra's Gemini is already doing materials science work now. It's very expensive, giant logistics companies and other industries with lots of capital and the need to do the special kinds of simu…

Could you post a few links to these things? Last I remember there were a few PoC around pushing toy-scale examples, but nobody close to "quantum supremacy for application X"?

A cursory google still seems to indicate people are using these things to learn how a hypothetical QC could be used in practice, rather than actually doing stuff in production or anything close to it.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#57

Post by benj111 »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #55
jmward01 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prepare for the 9.0 earthquake that can happen once in 500 years because it is a 9.0 earthquake and if you haven't prepared your society is dead, not because you think it will most likely happen in your lifetime.

This isn't preparing for earthquakes, which are a real thing and happen all the time. No-one has ever achieved any crypto result with a "quantum computer" after 20+ years and billions of dollars spent, and there's no sign they will either. So this isn't preparing for earthquakes, this is preparing for fairies and elves.

Most of the west had/have bomb shelters and other things for a nuclear attack.

"Fairies and elves" suggest it's impossible. It isn't impossible, just very difficult. I'm here in bed conversing with someone on the other side of the world with a hand held device. The would have been "Fairies and elves" 50 years ago.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#58

Post by plopilop »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #56
nemo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logistics companies are using hybrid QC now from D-Wave Systems. Quantum computing is currently in use in the real world. There's already physics simulations running on QC hardware beyond the capacities of classical computing, QuEra's Gemini is already doing materials science work now. It's very expensive, giant logistics companies and other industries with lots of capital and the need to do the special kinds of simu…

Could you post a few links to these things? Last I remember there were a few PoC around pushing toy-scale examples, but nobody close to "quantum supremacy for application X"? A cursory google still seems to indicate people are using these things to learn how a hypothetical QC could be used in practice, rather than actually doing stuff in production or anything close to it.

I have seen https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00314 as an example.

> Despite the limitations in size and speed of today’s quantum computers, our algorithm provides quantifiable liquidity savings when applied to the Canadian HVPS using a 30-day sample of transaction data. By reordering batches of 70 payments, we achieve an average of Canadian (C) $240 million in daily liquidity savings, with a settlement delay of approximately 90 seconds

It has to be noted that the technology used (quantum annealing) is at best erm disputed, and that the company DWave has made very wild claims in the past. Also note that many "quantum speedups" have been de-quantumized, i.e. classical algorithms with equal or even better performance have been developed, sometimes by drawing inspiration from the quantum algorithm. Quantum supremacy is still quite unclear.

Now, could the problems we are talking about be efficiently solved on a classical computer? Maybe. But if nobody knows how to do it, we might just as well use the quantum computer.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#59

Post by pseudohadamard »

benj111 wrote: post #57
pseudohadamard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't preparing for earthquakes, which are a real thing and happen all the time. No-one has ever achieved any crypto result with a "quantum computer" after 20+ years and billions of dollars spent, and there's no sign they will either. So this isn't preparing for earthquakes, this is preparing for fairies and elves.

Most of the west had/have bomb shelters and other things for a nuclear attack. "Fairies and elves" suggest it's impossible. It isn't impossible, just very difficult. I'm here in bed conversing with someone on the other side of the world with a hand held device. The would have been "Fairies and elves" 50 years ago.

Preparing for unicorns would be fine if that was the only problem out there. However what's actually out there is buffer overflows, phishing, SQLI, and a bazillion other attacks being exploited on a global scale. So every bit of effort invested in preparing for unicorns is effort that's not invested in dealing with the massive amounts of attacks that are happening right now. It has negative utility.

It's like worrying about reinforcing the barn wall in front of you against komodo dragons when the other three walls of the barn are missing.

Re: France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

#60

Post by dylan604 »

vitally3643 wrote: post #53
dylan604 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true, they wouldn't need to store it for ever

They need to store it because the technology to decrypt it does not yet exist.

boy did you miss the point. I know that's what they say, but the GP comment said that pretty much everything you need to know can be found just from the metadata which diminishes the claims for needing to decrypt the data. It's trivializing the value of the decrypted data.
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