Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amluto 77 days ago
> All serious financial businesses already have a quantum strategy and are actively working on transitioning their cryptography to post-quantum secure algorithms.

That’s hilarious and it’s not even April 1 anymore.

Lots of serious financial businesses still use FTP or use SFTP running some unbelievably bad server implementation on a Windows machine somewhere that uses such outdated cryptography that it doesn’t even interoperate with modern OpenSSH. Operations do not necessarily score highly on the ACID scale. It’s tied together with duct tape and baling wire.

On the other hand, the system works and is really remarkably resilient to various failure modes. You would be hard pressed to cause more than severe annoyance by compromising these crappy old systems.

1 comments

I work in the sector, and I'm responsible in my own organisation for our quantum strategy. Most, if not all, of the serious players are doing this. This doesn't mean we have replaced all our old crypto; far from it.

NIST has defined a timeline for post quantum readiness to be complete by 2035. Crypto migrations historically take a long time; you can't just replace your own stuff, or upgrade just a server. All the clients that interact have to upgrade as well or it all breaks.