[grayhatter]

It's a reasonable question. The need for quantum resistant crypto isn't because the practical attack is right around the corner. All though, I do really enjoy the analogy of predicting when we'll get QC based crypto attacks, is similar to predicting when humans will land on the moon by looking at the altitude for the highest manned flight. It has more to do with the level of effort it takes to replace infra as critical as cryptography.

Imagine if next year, via magic wand, all the current TLS systems were completely and totally broken such that the whole of the internet using TLS became effectively unencrypted in any way? How much damage would that do to the ecosystem? But we also just invented a new protocol that works, so how long would it take to deploy it to just 50%? or to 80%? And how long would it take to replace the long tail?

I'll also leave record now decrypt later for another commenter.

[MidnightRider39]

The problem is more that people concentrate a lot of energy on hypothetical future quantum attacks when the actual threats have been the same since the 00s: unvalidated input, buffer overflow, bad auth, xss, injection etc.

All the big important systems are again and again vulnerable to these attacks (Cisco, M$, fortinet, etc.) - but of course those aren’t “sexy” problems to research and resolve, so we get the same stuff over and over again while everyone is gushing to protect against some science fiction crypto attacks that are and have been for the last 30 years complete fantasy. It’s all a bit tiring to be honest.

[grayhatter]

It's a mistake to conflate cryptography, with application logic errors.

Your argument is akin to,

> The problem is that a lot of physicians concentrate on diabetes, or hypertension, when there's people who have been stabed, or shot. Constantly hearing about how heart disease is a big problem is tiring to be honest.

Also, I'm not sure what circles you run in, but if you had to ask any of my security friends if they wanted to spend time on a buffer overflow, or xss injection, or upgrading crypto primitives for quantum resistance... not a single one would pick quantum resistance.

> The problem is more that people concentrate a lot of energy on hypothetical future quantum attacks when the actual threats have been the same since the 00s

Just so I can be sure... you meant having the qbits to deploy such an attack, right? Because really the only thing stopping some of the quantum computing based attacks is number of stable qbits. They're not hypothetical attacks, they've been shown to work.

[MidnightRider39]

> any of my security friends if they wanted to spend time on … quantum

I commend your friends but many people in these HN threads seem to be ready to implement post-quantum encryption right now to protect against some future threats.

> you meant having the qbits to deploy such an attack, right

Yes - last time I checked it was like 3 stable qbits. It’s just so far off from being a reality i really can’t take that research seriously. I feel like a lot of resources are wasted in this kind of research when we are still dealing with very basic problems that aren’t just as sexy to tackle.

Edit: heart disease is a real thing so your analogy is lacking - there have been 0 security risks because of quantum in the real world. It’s more like “physicians concentrating on possible alien diseases from when we colonise the universe in the future while ignoring heart disease”

[snowwrestler]

I think one reason people want to take it seriously is that to the non-expert it just looks like a scale engineering problem, and people have proven to be shockingly good at scale engineering over the past century.