Oh boy. If they achieve half of what they hope to achieve, we need quantum-safe cryptography and we need it yesterday.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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They've already been working on it. I can't imagine what it would be like to be one of these big brains that understand this stuff.
I mean actually implemented in common cryptography libraries, and the old algorithms (RSA, ECC, etc) deprecated. It unfortunately takes a long time for applications to switch over to new cryptography, so the sooner this happens, the better.
I don't expect common criminals to have access to large quantum computers any time soon, but the intelligence agencies of your country's enemies will.
I saw a veritasium video recently making the argument that criminals and other such malicious actors with access to large quantum computers is already a problem, because even though they don't have the computers yet, they can collect data now that's still encrypted in ways that quantum computers can break, to be decrypted when they have them, and that some of that data will represent things that change infrequently enough for it to still be useful to them when that happens.