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I particularly like the end of the post where he compares the history of nuclear fission to the progress on quantum computing. Traditional encryption might alre

by bahmboo 10mo ago

I particularly like the end of the post where he compares the history of nuclear fission to the progress on quantum computing. Traditional encryption might already be broken but we have not been told.

bawolff 10mo ago
In a world where spying on civilian communication of adversaries (and preventing spying on your own civilians) is becoming more critical for national security interests, i suspect that national governments would be lighting more of a fire if they believe their opponents had one.
- the8472 10mo ago
  NSA is pushing for PQ algos.
- mvkel 10mo ago
  They absolutely are. NSA is obsessed with post-quantum projects atm
  - tyre 10mo ago
    But is this because they are already needed or because they want to preserve encryption for past and present data post-quantum?
    - mvkel 10mo ago
      The latter
  - GrilledChips 10mo ago
    tbh they could just be pushing for people to adopt newer, less-tested, weaker algorithms. switch from something battle-hardened to the QuantResist2000 algorithm which they've figured out how to break with lattice reduction and a couple of GPUs like those minecraft guys did.
    - kibwen 10mo ago
      Hybrid approaches are at least as strong as their strongest algorithm. You don't need to trust me on this, it's extremely simple to derive this principle yourself from basic knowledge of cryptography.
littlestymaar 10mo ago
I really doubt we are anywhere close to this when there has been no published legit prime factorization beyond 21: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf Surely if someone managed to factorize a 3 or 4 digits number, they would have published it as it's far enough of weaponization to be worth publishing. To be used to break cryptosystems, you need to be able to factor at least 2048-digits numbers. Even assuming the progress is linear with respect to the number of bits in the public key (this is the theoretical lower bound but assume hardware scaling is itself linear, which doesn't seem to be the case), there's a pretty big gap between 5 and 2048 and the fact that no-one has ever published any significant result (that is, not a magic trick by choosing the number in a way that makes the calculation trivial, see my link above) showing any process in that direction suggest we're not in any kind of immediate threat. The reality is that quantum computing is still very very hard, and very very far from being able what is theoretically possible with them.
throw310822 10mo ago
So you have one of the scientists at the forefront of quantum computing theory telling you that he has no idea if quantum computing is already in a much more advanced state that he himself knows about? If results in quantum computing would start to "go dark", unpublished in scientific literature and only communicated to the government/ military, shouldn't he be one of the first to know or at least notice?

by bahmboo 10mo ago

bawolff 10mo ago

In a world where spying on civilian communication of adversaries (and preventing spying on your own civilians) is becoming more critical for national security interests, i suspect that national governments would be lighting more of a fire if they believe their opponents had one.

the8472 10mo ago
NSA is pushing for PQ algos.
mvkel 10mo ago
They absolutely are. NSA is obsessed with post-quantum projects atm
- tyre 10mo ago
  But is this because they are already needed or because they want to preserve encryption for past and present data post-quantum?
  - mvkel 10mo ago
    The latter
- GrilledChips 10mo ago
  tbh they could just be pushing for people to adopt newer, less-tested, weaker algorithms. switch from something battle-hardened to the QuantResist2000 algorithm which they've figured out how to break with lattice reduction and a couple of GPUs like those minecraft guys did.
  - kibwen 10mo ago
    Hybrid approaches are at least as strong as their strongest algorithm. You don't need to trust me on this, it's extremely simple to derive this principle yourself from basic knowledge of cryptography.

littlestymaar 10mo ago

I really doubt we are anywhere close to this when there has been no published legit prime factorization beyond 21: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf Surely if someone managed to factorize a 3 or 4 digits number, they would have published it as it's far enough of weaponization to be worth publishing. To be used to break cryptosystems, you need to be able to factor at least 2048-digits numbers. Even assuming the progress is linear with respect to the number of bits in the public key (this is the theoretical lower bound but assume hardware scaling is itself linear, which doesn't seem to be the case), there's a pretty big gap between 5 and 2048 and the fact that no-one has ever published any significant result (that is, not a magic trick by choosing the number in a way that makes the calculation trivial, see my link above) showing any process in that direction suggest we're not in any kind of immediate threat. The reality is that quantum computing is still very very hard, and very very far from being able what is theoretically possible with them.

throw310822 10mo ago

So you have one of the scientists at the forefront of quantum computing theory telling you that he has no idea if quantum computing is already in a much more advanced state that he himself knows about? If results in quantum computing would start to "go dark", unpublished in scientific literature and only communicated to the government/ military, shouldn't he be one of the first to know or at least notice?