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I'm not sure why I'm meant to care about NSA's recommendations.

Meanwhile: everything you can reasonably use today is broken in post-quantum world.




By everything you mean every public key scheme? Aren't symmetric crypto schemes based on strong shared secrets secure from quantum computers?

With Optalysys and D-Wave, I expect quantum computing to become mainstream within the next ten years.


Every real-world cryptosystem in current use, possibly excepting some experimental pq systems like the RingLWE that Google's playing with.


Symmetric encryption is weakened; namely, a quantum computer can search through a space of size 2n in time 2n/2. This means that a 128-bit AES key would be demoted back to the strength of a 64-bit key ...

[1] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/48022/what-kinds...


I'm really not interested in how well PSK AES schemes fare post-quantum, because PSK isn't a realistic solution to any of the problems we use cryptography to address.

I suggested, upthread, not using RSA (which depends on the hardness of factoring) and using ECC instead. How AES does post-quantum is not responsive to that advice.


You suggested ECC over RSA, implying that ECC offers greater security than RSA in the context of easy prime factorization. ECC's security relies on the hardness of the discrete logarithm. Yet, both prime factorization and the discrete logarithm are both special cases of the hidden subgroup problem over an Abelian group. In short, cracking RSA means cracking ECC, too.

Am I wrong? Were you just joking?


@tptacek

> I believe you to be wrong about the idea that tenably factoring 1024 or 2048 bit moduli implies a solution to the elliptic curve discrete modulus problem

Probably. This mathy stuff is way over my head. I'm just repeating what I read in Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer [1] published by Peter W. Shor on behalf of AT&T Research in 1995. Supposedly his proof is valid, predicated on the existence of quantum computers. Quantum computers actually exist [insert epistemological joke here].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9508027v2


You are talking about quantum attacks, whereas tptacek is talking about classical attacks.


If I understand your argument properly, then I believe you to be wrong about the idea that tenably factoring 1024 or 2048 bit moduli implies a solution to the elliptic curve discrete modulus problem, yes.


So we'll take a performance hit, but it's fairly straightforward (relatively, very relatively) to extend the key sizes for symmetric crypto.

The lack of any usable asymmetric algorithms is a much greater concern.




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