3 ms·
"encryption is good at ensuring data confidentiality in the near term" Very interesting. I knew that state actors syphon everything, but I assumed it was since
by sdfasf 5y ago
"encryption is good at ensuring data confidentiality in the near term"
Very interesting. I knew that state actors syphon everything, but I assumed it was since they can afford and it's a Hail Mary if they stumble on a breakthrough or a side channel. Some further Qs:
- What's near term?
- What's in the far term?
- I thought that encryption could be made arbitrarily more difficult to crack at little cost. Is this not the case?
- Does this future assume quantum computing is feasible?
Finally, if encryption is no longer believed to be safe in the long term, shouldn't we be moving towards making one-time pads practical? Given modern data storage densities, it's not that unpractical for many use cases (say embassy communication, etc)
- nradov 5y agoIn theory if large scale quantum computing becomes practical then it might become possible to decrypt traffic encrypted using certain public key algorithms. Basically by using Shor's algorithm to factor large numbers. But there's no guarantee that will ever work in practice, and even if it does there are alternative encryption algorithms which are resistant to quantum computing attacks. It's also not easy to identify and exfiltrate high bandwidth data streams even if you compromise a piece of network equipment. If Chinese intelligence services want information on a certain politician or business leader they're more likely to skip the decryption nonsense and just recruit one of the target's associates as a spy.