> I could also be misremembering our conversation, but I thought you had said something like 2029 or 2030 in our 2020 conversation
Think that must've been around 2022. It'd have been me mentioning 2030 regulatory deadlines. So far progress in PQC adoption has been mostly driven by (expected) compliance. Now it'll shift to a security issue again.
> My concern is that there's so much human and financial capital behind quantum computing that the "experts" have lots of reason to try to convince you that it's going to happen any day now.
There've been alarmist publications for years. If it were just some physicists again, I'd have been sceptical. This is the security folks at Google pulling the alarm (among others.)
> [B]ut we also don't have any proof (existence or theoretical) that proves they are actually possible.
The theoretic foundation is pretty basic quantum mechanics. It'd be a big surprise if there'd be a blocker there. What's left is the engineering. The problem is that definite proof means an actual quantum computer... which means it's already too late.
> The other challenge is we don't know where BQP fits
This is philosophy. Even P=NP doesn't imply cryptography is hopeless. If the concrete cost between using and breaking is large enough (even if it's not asymptotically) we can have perfectly secure systems. But this is quite a tangent.
> Should we prepare for QC on the cryptography side?
A 10% chance it happens by 2030, means we'll need to migrate by 2029.
> it and ongoing in terms of slowing down worldwide communications
We've been working hard to make the impact negligible. For key agreement the impact is very small. And with Merkle Tree Certificates we also make the overhead for authentication negligible.
Think that must've been around 2022. It'd have been me mentioning 2030 regulatory deadlines. So far progress in PQC adoption has been mostly driven by (expected) compliance. Now it'll shift to a security issue again.
> My concern is that there's so much human and financial capital behind quantum computing that the "experts" have lots of reason to try to convince you that it's going to happen any day now.
There've been alarmist publications for years. If it were just some physicists again, I'd have been sceptical. This is the security folks at Google pulling the alarm (among others.)
> [B]ut we also don't have any proof (existence or theoretical) that proves they are actually possible.
The theoretic foundation is pretty basic quantum mechanics. It'd be a big surprise if there'd be a blocker there. What's left is the engineering. The problem is that definite proof means an actual quantum computer... which means it's already too late.
> The other challenge is we don't know where BQP fits
This is philosophy. Even P=NP doesn't imply cryptography is hopeless. If the concrete cost between using and breaking is large enough (even if it's not asymptotically) we can have perfectly secure systems. But this is quite a tangent.
> Should we prepare for QC on the cryptography side?
A 10% chance it happens by 2030, means we'll need to migrate by 2029.
> it and ongoing in terms of slowing down worldwide communications
We've been working hard to make the impact negligible. For key agreement the impact is very small. And with Merkle Tree Certificates we also make the overhead for authentication negligible.