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Sorry, I must have left out private entities, which led to downvotes. Snowden is likely to have caused an exodus of hoarded intent of knowledge towards private

Sorry, I must have left out private entities, which led to downvotes. Snowden is likely to have caused an exodus of hoarded intent of knowledge towards private global interests, away from governments. So the quantum race, then, would be going on behind the scenes with both private and public interests. How hard will it be to switch to post quantum encryption globally once it’s clear publicly that there’s at least a proof of concept for a quantum decryption supercomputer? How do you differentiate between cloned 210 iq babies in massive underground communities (as an example) working on decades in the future tech, and safeguards amongst the destructive forces of the powerful hegemonic incumbency. There’s an applicable abstraction here, generally, about containing superior intelligence, whether artificial or biological. I do believe recent Star Trek movie touched upon this

cyphar 7y ago
> How hard will it be to switch to post quantum encryption globally once it’s clear publicly that there’s at least a proof of concept for a quantum decryption supercomputer? In theory switching could be "simple" but depends very strongly on what post-quantum algorithms we end up with. If we have a good replacement for Diffie-Hellman (the current candidate appears to CSIDH[1]) then you could replace effectively everything with it because the protocols could be left unchanged. The keys might be a bit larger but who cares. However, if there is no safe Diffie-Hellman replacement then we'll need to change our protocols to accommodate the new crypto. Symmetric-key crypto appears to be mostly safe (Grover's Algorithm can only provide a square-root improvement and so we can just double our key sizes to 256 or 512 bit) so we only need to fix the public-key part, and can work on replacing the rest later. [1]: https://csidh.isogeny.org/ https://csidh.isogeny.org/

cyphar 7y ago

> How hard will it be to switch to post quantum encryption globally once it’s clear publicly that there’s at least a proof of concept for a quantum decryption supercomputer? In theory switching could be "simple" but depends very strongly on what post-quantum algorithms we end up with. If we have a good replacement for Diffie-Hellman (the current candidate appears to CSIDH[1]) then you could replace effectively everything with it because the protocols could be left unchanged. The keys might be a bit larger but who cares. However, if there is no safe Diffie-Hellman replacement then we'll need to change our protocols to accommodate the new crypto. Symmetric-key crypto appears to be mostly safe (Grover's Algorithm can only provide a square-root improvement and so we can just double our key sizes to 256 or 512 bit) so we only need to fix the public-key part, and can work on replacing the rest later. [1]: https://csidh.isogeny.org/ https://csidh.isogeny.org/