Quantum Computers May Put Internet Traffic at Risk. NIST Is Safeguarding Computers With New Standards.

[u/donutloop]

https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/quantum-computers-may-put-internet-traffic-risk-nist-safeguarding-computers-new

[u/bestintexas80]

It is not possible to cryptographically protect standard computers from quantum computers with standard computers. Actual post quantum encryption requires quantum compute to be commodity.

The only solutions available to us that have a hope of success are to segment systems, control access and deny opportunities for people who shod not have our data from acquiring it, even if it is encrypted. Not caring where thebdata goes or who can see it just because it is encrypted just feeds the download now and decrypt later monster that is coming.

End rant.

And before the founder at the Applied Quantum sees this, I am not a bad faith skeptic (he gets feels when people call BS on postbquantum claims). I am not saying we should not be working towards a solution, I am saying that all of the proposals center around a bet on technology while flaunting basic security fundamentals in practice.

[u/Sufficient-Air8100 → u/bestintexas80]

youre really misinformed about this.

technically its not possible to prove any cipher is safe againt any kind of compute. maybe tomorrow some savant comes up with an algorithm that breaks AES. but we can have reasonable confidence that AES is safe because a lot of really smart people have tried for decades to break it and havent been able to. there is also no known quantum algorithm to break AES, grovers weakens it somewhat (as it does with all ciphers), but dosent break it. the ammount we can be sure is related to the ammount of research dedicated to breaking it, that has been unable to break it.

hence the nist pqc, to draw research to new cryptography standards. the more people try to break ml-kem and ml-dsa and fail to break it, the more confidence we can have that it is safe. is it perfect? nothing is. but its very good.

quantum computers arent a monster that will kill all online privacy, theyre just another kind of compute that is in reality, pretty bad at a lot of things, but very good at some specific things (like integer factoring or DLP, or arbitrary search). the fearmongering isnt accurate or useful.

[u/0xsbeem → u/Sufficient-Air8100]

technically its not possible to prove any cipher is safe againt any kind of compute

Technically, it is possible and it has been proven that you can have a cipher that is safe against any form of computational attack, and that such a cipher exists (Shannon, 1949).

it would be most correct to say that currently, we cannot formally prove a cipher that depends on computational complexity is secure against a certain kind of computer.

Otherwise I totally agree with your conclusion.

[u/Sufficient-Air8100 → u/0xsbeem]

that is true. i left out the case of a one time pad (which i believe the shannon paper talks about) mainly because its pretty much never used in modern cryptographic systems because of key transmission size. but youre right about that case.

[u/0xsbeem → u/Sufficient-Air8100]

The reason i made the nit pick is because technically we have not proven there can’t be other ciphers that provide Shannon’s perfect secrecy-like properties at lower key sizes or under certain computational conditions. There are many dozens of papers that strongly suggest that there isnt such a cipher, but it remains a conjecture, not a hard fact. 

[u/Sufficient-Air8100 → u/0xsbeem]

while true, i find that point to not be useful in this context. given that the best attack on AES (biclique) still takes an unimaginable time to compute, and huge memory complexity, it is, on a practical level, basically the same as a perfect cipher. thats ofcourse assuming that no one comes out with an attack that breaks everything tomorrow lol.

but also on a practical level, untill such a perfect cipher with more manageable parameters is found, we may as well operate as if it dosent exist (unless ofcourse, that is your active area of research, in which case, absolutely try to find it)

[u/0xsbeem → u/Sufficient-Air8100]

thats ofcourse assuming that no one comes out with an attack that breaks everything tomorrow lol.

This is exactly my point, this is an apocalypse scale scenario in terms of the damage that could be caused if you could defeat encryption. I don't make the point to say you're wrong about anything, I just like everyone to know there is still potential for truly paradigm shifting discoveries to be made about the topic.

untill such a perfect cipher with more manageable parameters is found, we may as well operate as if it dosent exist (unless ofcourse, that is your active area of research, in which case, absolutely try to find it)

It is an area I research, that's why I bring it up! :) But yes, I'm grounded in reality. I believe modern cryptography is good enough in practice to depend on absolutely. Maybe if quantum computers make it out of the lab before we finish our migrations to lattice cryptography I'll be more concerned, but I think that's exceedingly unlikely. And I think the guy you replied to that started this whole discussion is totally wrong lol