this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
410 points (97.2% liked)

Technology

59453 readers
4067 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
410
Mathematician warns NSA may be weakening next-gen encryption (www.newscientist.com)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
45 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Mathematician warns NSA may be weakening next-gen encryption::Quantum computers may soon be able to crack encryption methods in use today, so plans are already under way to replace them with new, secure algorithms. Now it seems the US National Security Agency may be undermining that process

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hopefully we work around this, encryption is more important now than ever.

[–] Ultraviolet 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn't the existence of key collision help? If you throw a quantum brute force algorithm at a ciphertext, wouldn't you get a long list of keys, all of which authenticate and appear to work, but for all but one of those keys, what it decrypts to is garbage?

Authentication itself is fucked, but encryption is only heavily weakened rather than completely destroyed.

[–] RubberElectrons 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah but that's precisely the problem. Cut the list down to say a million choices vs quadrillions, and have a regular lower power server work through that much smaller list.

Don't forget, this is gen 1 of the quantum systems as well... Who knows what the future holds. Better to make the lock strong now.