Leading cryptography (ISE Crypto) at Google.
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Content usually badly explained mathematics
| profession | cryptography engineer |
| hobby | Kerbal Space Program |
| hobby | Lego |
| hobby | Factory Sim Games |
I post links about the quantum thing. That is my life now, I guess.
Anyways, here is Cloudflare following suit and setting 2029 as target date, and Scott slowing losing his mind over people being dumb on the internet.
Two papers came out last week that suggest classical asymmetric cryptography might indeed be broken by quantum computers in just a few years.
That means we need to ship post-quantum crypto now, with the tools we have: ML-KEM and ML-DSA. I didn't think PQ auth was so urgent until recently.
And the posts, they keep on coming.
I hundred percent agree with @filippo here, the question is not whether we're certain that a quantum computer exists by 2029, it's whether we're certain that one doesn't exist. And things have progressed far enough that non-physicists, or even physicists working in different subfields, can no longer reliably tell what's going on.
I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.
A very nice explainer why "if you're so worried about quantum computers, why haven't they factored 21 yet?" isn't a very convincing argument. Look at the labels of the graph, and how extremely close the various lines are for factoring 21 and 2048 bit numbers. Polynomial scaling remains polynomial, unfortunately, and by the time you can factor 21 you're almost ready to break RSA.
And now also on Ars Technica:
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Filippo Valsorda
Clemens
Elizabeth Ayer
Alex Kretzschmar
