There is a race to crack the most common encryption algorithms. The official estimation is that they are 30 years away from it (reduced from the original 100 years they provided only 5 years ago), so their progress is faster that they expected and this tech is now considered a weapon.
The country that gets there first will have a very valuable window of opportunity… It’s a race.
Governments are also hoovering up encrypted files and storing them for later so when the time comes, they can go and decrypt everything.
Gov seized your hard drive and you feel safe knowing it’s encrypted, better hope the forgot where they put it in 15 years.
Anything that’s “30 years away” is essentially not going to happen. Quantum cryptography will advance faster than the ability to break it because there will be more money behind it.
That’s not really the concern, quantum cryptography already works, we have more robust encryption techniques.
The problem is that the planet has a whole lot of saved communications still encrypted with old techniques, and those are all at risk of being decrypted later. If you were transmitting encrypted data, knowing that there’s was a man in the middle, you probably felt pretty clever, as even the watchers couldn’t read it… But they could record it and save it. Now all those saved recordings are likely to come out.
a very valuable window of opportunity…
Because that turned out so well during the Cold War.
The article suggested there are quantum computers not available to the public. Easier to get restrictive laws passed for things that arent ready for public consumption, but they all know the pulic is going to get those things eventually and put into place barriers before people care about them.
Its some long term thinking for it to be true, but it tracks they might be using something that behind closed doors, is leaps ahead of what most people know about
I bet the military/spy agency has finally got their hands on faster cracking technology.
Infinite quantum instantiation would allow anyone with the technology to instantly find massive prime factors and decrypt anything.
No more secrets.
No more secrets.
Post-quantum cryptography enters the chat
Sneakers (1992) “no more secrets”: https://youtu.be/F5bAa6gFvLs?si=0OAFE-Pp2_Bc8AI8 Not quantum computing of course but still, a great movie.
Yup. Good movie.
Well fuck, time to make a big list of every single encryption protocol vulnerable to quantum attacks and every single foss application that relies on that and get it fixed.
A far shorter list would be the few that are not vulnerable
