[raarts]

> Don't confuse symmetric with asymmetric (current public key) encryption

After reading this multiple times, and looking up QC (Quantum Computing) and FDE (Full Disk Encryption), I got the following out of it:

- symmetric encryption is safe for AES-256 and up - asymmetric encryption isn't getting cracked because QC isn't magic

Is this a correct TL;DR ?

[prrls]

The computations used to do symmetric and asymmetric encryptions are completely different. Asymmetric encryption is just about factoring out big numbers into primes, if we simplify things a bit. And modern computers aren't very good at it, but Quantum Computer happens to be, and can break it. Read a bit about Shor's Algorithm[0].

On the other hand, symmetric encryption can be seen as a super convoluted and costly shift cipher. And it seems that Quantum Computing does not help much with dumb and costly mathematics like this.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm