Roe vs Wade being overturned is a big one lmao

  • @darkcalling
    link
    22 years ago

    Depends on what schemes you mean. Stuff like RSA which relies on unsolveable math problems, yes that’s fucked so in theory a lot of HTTPS web traffic will in future be deciphered by the NSA if they’ve been storing it (they have been for a while now). But things like AES-256 as someone mentioned, certain other schemes should be quantum safe.

    Put it this way, a good strong password on AES-256 encryption can put you at a cracking time of hundreds of millions of years. Shaving off even 95% of that time with quantum computing wouldn’t be helpful because you’d still be looking at millions of years of cracking effort. In practice anything that puts cracking time beyond two decades or so of effort is something that protects the data because nothing but a formula for time travel is going to be of that much value to governments to spend such an amount of time dedicating a massive array just to cracking it. In practice LEO will usually give up on cracking something after perhaps 12-16 months of efforts and declare it failed. NSA and so on have more or less given up on cracking actually strong encryption so much as trying to subvert and weaken implementations with bad math and much more broadly just moving to straight up hacking victims and putting malware to grab the data before its encrypted.

    AES has certain problems with it, there are methods for shaving off a certain amount of bits but even these when considered against a strong implementation (in terms of passwords we’re talking >=20 characters, upper/lower case, digits, symbols) don’t really put it within the realm of truly broken in a reasonable time frame as I mentioned above.