this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
80 points (97.6% liked)
Asklemmy
44630 readers
1110 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve a few problems in chemistry and condensed matter physics, but on the other hand they definitely will make a lot of encryption we heavily rely on obsolete, and the replacements are noticeably inferior. And that's about it, because quantum algorithms are hard to design. So, that seems like a net negative to me.
Deep neural nets are powerful, but the fact we fundamentally don't understand how they work is a bit nerve-wracking.
We knew about piss poor encryption a long time ago, every modern algorithm is quantum proof. That includes AES, Kerberos and even 3GPP encryption used in mobile networks. So unless you're using old crap, you're safe even if quantum computers will become powerful tomorrow.
No? Shor's algorithm breaks RSA and literally anything elliptic curve-based, which covers all conventional asymmetric algorithms. Symmetric algorithms like you listed aren't effected, but are useless for communication unless you have an asymmetric algorithm or, like, a physical carrier pigeon to share a secret beforehand.
This is why NIST is currently finalising several post-quantum standards. Which work, but don't do anything fancy, and have comparatively gigantic primitives you have to send back and forth - i.e. are worse.
What do you mean by useless? These are standard algorithms used everywhere. Get your head out of the sand.
Yeah, and they all bootstrap using things like Diffie-Hellman, and intrinsically must. Which are broken by Shor's algorithm. For example, a TLS connection could use TLS_ECDHE to share a secret and generate a temporary one-time secret, and then move to an AES stream based on that shared secret for the actual data. If a quantum attacker broke that first step, they could read the AES-encrypted data no problem, because they would also have the one-time secret.
Do you have some choice insults for NIST as well? They're putting a lot of effort into things like Kyber, but maybe they don't understand cryptographic protocols as well as you do.