
 It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) - wglb
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/its-end-of-world-as-we-know-it-and-i.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AFewThoughtsOnCryptographicEngineering+%28A+Few+Thoughts+on+Cryptographic+Engineering%29
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rollypolly
This article makes me wonder if the government may already possess quantum
computers.

If they did, how would we know?

~~~
zdw
If they did have them, they'd most likely have to hide their existence for
quite some time.

During WWII, after the Allies had broken the Enigma cipher and were reading
all the German communication, they still had to allow enemy actions that would
result in loss of human life, just so they wouldn't tip their hand and reveal
that they had broken the code.

I'd assume it would be the same today - a plausible non-crypto way of getting
data came out ("We beat him with a pipe until he told us the password", ala
<http://xkcd.com/538/> ) would be a better explanation than if they broke a
code with some quantum ubercomputer.

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iuguy
GCHQ had public key cryptography in the early 1970s, a few years before
Diffie-Helman and RSA did their work. While I think it'd be difficult to hide
properly functional quantum computing (given the amount of interaction between
public and private sector) it wouldn't surprise me if fine minds on both sides
of the atlantic were doing advanced research in the field.

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randomdata
From the article: _They can't see the future._

Forgive my ignorance of quantum computing, but the classical computer can see
the future in a finite image space by computing every image combination. It
just turns out to be _a lot_ of computing to see every variation in any space
of reasonable size.

Isn't this something a quantum computer would excel at, by computing the
variations concurrently?

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ge0rg
Maybe quantum cryptology will finally release us from the extortion business
model based on "trustworthy" SSL certificates.

~~~
jerf
Completely unrelated.

