Just to add info to this thread: You need to update your encryption for the first Quantum Computers. They will break EVERY* encryption right now (*if its not quantum safe) - You need and have to readjust live now encryption to be quantum protected. Especially your SSH connections to other computers and there login Mechanics.
Right Now!
Gosh. Then you have to invent a new encryption or like A.I. does another pre-physical layer to share Info in Genomes or encrypted Atoms. What someone else - can not understand it is power for you with knowledge. The whole Evolution is about it. Just with shape, Color, Decentralization and Attraction.
Not so. Only Public Key (RSA, DH) crypto is at risk. Symmetric crypto like AES will not be broken - just brute-forcing it will be lessened (by about squareroot(n)) so if you only add one bit to the key length, brute-forcing it requires twice the previous space. We’ll be safe with AES256 for a very long time and now AES512 is becoming common.
This comes from Christals video link. It was very informative and should answer nearly every question you have.
@nerd7473: It doesn’t matter what key is private and which one is not. Quantum computers brute force against encryption with a quantum algorithm. Most of our daily async encryption algorithms can be brute force easily this way and doubling the length doesn’t help much. We have to migrate to new encryption algorithms that people already working on.
Unfortunately not. PGP is key pair (public + private key) asymmetric crypto. It is typically what is expected to be broken by CRQC (Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer) machines, using the Shor algorithm that can in theory break RSA keys (break here means: being able to recover the secret private key paired with the known public key - in a reasonable time frame e.g. hours or few days)
Hence the current strategy “save now - decrypt later” which will make everyone’s encrypted emails plaintext readable if or when such CRQC machines exist and are powerfull enough to crack RSA 2048 bits keys commonly used today.
But we are far from such technology: it is estimated that 20 million Qbits would be needed in order to crack 2048 RSA keys…and what we’ve seen up to now is barely above 1000 Qbits - a long way off and the more Qbits in a system, the more instability and errors (decoherence) so even more Qbits needed for errors correction, with ever increasing instability, etc.
That said, there are recent and promising new avenues of reseach like Microsoft’s Majorana particle topological chip and Google’s Willow quantum chip (Damn! Them again evil BigTech!)
That’s why we should all move to quantum safe algos for data at rest as soon as possible.
And also remember the saying: “a cryptographic algorithm is safe…until it is broken”
Your text is written very well. You wrote some points I wanted to start a quote with “but …” and at the next moment you already explained that part as well. That describes our situation very well.
I’ve split this off because breaking encryption using a QC is rather beside the point as far as banning encryption.
I have the feeling that if it was easy to break encryption using QC then
no government would be banning encryption - because you want to encourage that false sense of security
they would instead be restricting the distribution of QCs (although the price for a realistic QC that could actually break any encryption would be beyond the means of the average person, well beyond the day when a realistic QC even exists).
That describes our situation very well.