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Is it? Your reasoning relies on this being true: > [CRQCs] will be slow, expensive, and power hungry for at least a decade How could you know that? What if i
by scythmic_waves 6mo ago
Is it?
Your reasoning relies on this being true:
> [CRQCs] will be slow, expensive, and power hungry for at least a decade
How could you know that? What if it was 5 years? 1 year? 6 months?
I predict there will be an insane global pivot once Q-day arrives. No nation wants to invest billions in science fiction. Every nation wants to invest billions in a practical reality of being able to read everyone's secrets.
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo agoThe absolute low end of cost of a QC is the cost of an MRI machine ~100k-400k (cost of cooling the computer to super low temps). Sure we expect QCs to get faster and cheaper over time, but putting 100% faith in the security of the PQC algorithms seems like a bad idea with no upside.
- FiloSottile 6mo agoWe can disagree on the tradeoff, but if you see no upside, you are missing the velocity cost of the specification work, the API design, and the implementation complexity. Plus the annoying but real social cost of all the bikeshedding and bickering.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo agoAll of those are costs are at least as high for non-hybrid. The spec and API are just as easy to design (because we have really good and simple ECC libraries), and the bikeshedding and bickering will be a lot less if people stop trying to force pure PQC algorithms that lots of people see as incredibly risky for incredibly little benefit.
- phicoh 6mo agoIt is the paradox of PQC: from a classical security point of view PQC cannot be trusted (except for hash-based algorithms which are not very practical). So to get something we can trust we need hybrid. However, the premise for introducing PQC in the first place is that quantum computers can break classical public key crypto, so hybrid doesn't provide any benefit over pure PQC. Yes, the sensible thing to do is hybrid. But that does assume that either PQC cannot be broken by classical computers or that quantum computers will be rare or expensive enough that they don't break your classical public key crypto.
- FiloSottile 6mo ago> from a classical security point of view PQC cannot be trusted [citation needed] https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/#fn:lattices https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/#fn:lattices
- cyberax 6mo agoIt's purely a matter of _potential_ issues. The research on lattice-based crypto is still young compared to EC/RSA. Side channels, hardware bugs, unexpected research breakthroughs all can happen. And there are no downsides to adding regular classical encryption. The resulting secret will be at least as secure as the _most_ secure algorithm. The overhead of additional signatures and keys is also not that large compared to regular ML-KEM secrets.
- tptacek 6mo agoNo it's not. This is the wrong argument. It's telling how many people trying to make a big stink out of non-hybrid PQC don't even get what the real argument is.
- cyberax 6mo ago? I'm not entirely sure what's the problem?
- tptacek 6mo agoIt's definitely not that "The research on lattice-based crypto is still young compared to EC/RSA."
- cyberax 6mo agoUhm...? As far as I know, the currently standardized lattice methods are not known to be vulnerable? And the biggest controversy seemed to be the push for inclusion of non-hybrid methods? I'm not following crypto closely anymore, I stopped following the papers around 2014, right when learning-with-errors started becoming mainstream.