this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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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.
More like estimates on this are completely unreliable. As in that 100 years could have as well been 1000 years. It was pretty much "until an unpredictable technological paradigm shift happens". "100 years in future" is "when we have warp drives and star gates" of estimates. Pretty "when we have advanced to next level of advancement and technology, whenever it happens. 100 years should be good minimum of this not being taken as an actual year number estimate".
30 years is "we see maybe a potential path to this via hypothetical developments of technology in horizon". It's the classical "Fusion is always 30 years away". Until one time it isn't, but that 30 year loop can go on indefinitely, if the hypothetical don't turn to reality. Since you know we thought "maybe that will work, once we put out mind in to it". Oh it didn't, on to chasing next path.
I only know of one project, that has 100 year estimate, that is real. That is the Onkalo deep repository of spent fuel in Finland. It has estimate of spending 100 years being filled and is to be sealed in 2120's and that is an actual date. Since all the tech is known, the sealing process is known, it just happens to take a century to fill the repository bit by bit. Finland is kinda stable country and radiation hazard such long term, that whatever government is to be there in 2120's, they will most likely seal the repository.
Unless "we invent warp drives" happens before that and some new process of actually efficiently and very safely getting rid of the waste is found in some process. (and no that doesn't include current recycling methods. Since those aren't that good to get rid of this large amount and with small enough risk of side harms. Surprise, this was studied by Finland as alternative and it was simply decided "recycling is not good enough, simple enough, efficient enough and safe enough yet. Bury it in bedrock tomb").
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.
Drives are usually encrypted with symmetric ciphers (usually AES) and these are reasonably secure against quantum attacks with a key big enough.
And with the vast majority of crimes you just need to wait until the statute of limitations, which in cryptography and quantum fields is quite short period.
There's no hiding secrets from the future.
With math you can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed to enforce cryptographs in the past.
Not all encryption is vulnerable to quantum.
...another argument for aggressive statute of limitations for all non-violent crimes.
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.
The good news is, a lot of old secrets won't really matter anymore by the time we have quantum computers that can break the encryption. There will obviously be a big impact on information that was encrypted just before we get a working quantum computer that can crack modern crypto.
In cryptography discussions, I feel like we're usually implying (or even saying out loud) that the encryption is secure for a sufficient amount of time and computer power. Perhaps people outside of cryptography don't know it, but I think there is a reasonable expectation that encrypted communications could be decrypted at some point in the future. We just hope it's sufficiently far enough away (or difficult enough) to not be a problem.
Honestly as soon as we get some good post-quantum crypto, we'll probably want to switch over to it asap, even if good quantum computers are still far out, just to help alleviate some of this problem. Of course, I imagine we're still going to be finding new things once the technology is real and being used. Let's hope the post-quantum cryptography algorithms we come up with actually are strong against a sufficiently large quantum computer.
TLS already has quantum-hardened algorithms in it.
Theres already a ton of datasets that have been stolen that won't benefit from new encryption standards. Steal now, decrypt later.
I can't wait to see the clusterfuck when the blockchains unravel.
Because that turned out so well during the Cold War.