| This is nonsense. - Crypto building blocks are important basic research because it underpins everything. - Good crypto (this exists btw) is impossible to beat, unless QC is available. That's why PQC is being researched. Think about what kind of crypto NSA wants to break, it's not your bank of america passwords. - IDK why this guy thinks we need to shut down Los Alamos to do crypto, does he not think the NSA has datacenters of its own? - The problem with "well, it's not a problem now, why are we preparing for it" is that nation states are storing everything that is going on in the internet, waiting for when QC becomes active. This essentially means you can assume every secret you have will not be secret in 10/20/50 years. Your password is probably fine, but if you sent secret diplomatic cable today, it might be unlocked for your adversaries some years later. These secret nation-state comms are designed to be unlocked after N years normally since keeping them secret forever is expensive; PQC is simply designed to withhold that number N. - The NSA is generally known to be several decades ahead of the academia. They infamously knew and corrected a differential cryptography vulnerability in DES long before differential cryptanalysis was known in the public community. Saying QC isn't growing fast enough doesn't mean much. - The 2008 financial crisis metaphor is the only one that seemed poignant |
I'm not very bright, what kind of encryption does NSA want to break?