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Isn't this article pretty much fear mongering? There's no way the NSA has a reasonably powerful quantum computer and the proper algorithms to do anything. Howev

Isn't this article pretty much fear mongering? There's no way the NSA has a reasonably powerful quantum computer and the proper algorithms to do anything. However, the question still remains once these devices are feasible and popular: how can they use it to process the data they've already collected?

ryandvm 13y ago
I don't know about that. If a quantum computer is possible, you can rest assured that the U.S. defense complex has procured themselves one with their unfathomable budget.
- jzelinskie 13y ago
  Quantum computers are very well possible; whether they are feasible to data mine our large amounts of data is the actual question. You don't think the corporate entities in the tech industry would be just as invested? This is an area of research far too large to be concealed within the government. I wonder what the NSA program would look like if it wasn't for the surge in "big data" tooling after Google's MapReduce/GFS/BigTable papers.
tptacek 13y ago
To anyone who really understands the NSA's reputation, it seems like a uniquely silly kind of fear-mongering. The traditional rap against the NSA is that they've had productive breaks on all our conventional crypto constructions for decades (a more refined, modern bit of innuendo about NSA is that they have a cookbook of surprising implementation faults; side channels, for instance, that we haven't thought of yet --- here it's worth remembering that very few people in the world truly understand x64 and ARM microarchitecture, and Venn diagram overlap of those people and cryptographers is microscopic). Crypto implementors have worked under the assumption that most crypto is suspect, given that they're outspent 100:1 by NSA, for decades. "Revelations" about quantum computing at NSA as applied to cryptography would change basically nothing about how the smart money would bet on NSA capabilities.

ryandvm 13y ago

I don't know about that. If a quantum computer is possible, you can rest assured that the U.S. defense complex has procured themselves one with their unfathomable budget.

jzelinskie 13y ago
Quantum computers are very well possible; whether they are feasible to data mine our large amounts of data is the actual question. You don't think the corporate entities in the tech industry would be just as invested? This is an area of research far too large to be concealed within the government. I wonder what the NSA program would look like if it wasn't for the surge in "big data" tooling after Google's MapReduce/GFS/BigTable papers.

tptacek 13y ago

To anyone who really understands the NSA's reputation, it seems like a uniquely silly kind of fear-mongering. The traditional rap against the NSA is that they've had productive breaks on all our conventional crypto constructions for decades (a more refined, modern bit of innuendo about NSA is that they have a cookbook of surprising implementation faults; side channels, for instance, that we haven't thought of yet --- here it's worth remembering that very few people in the world truly understand x64 and ARM microarchitecture, and Venn diagram overlap of those people and cryptographers is microscopic). Crypto implementors have worked under the assumption that most crypto is suspect, given that they're outspent 100:1 by NSA, for decades. "Revelations" about quantum computing at NSA as applied to cryptography would change basically nothing about how the smart money would bet on NSA capabilities.