I post this in PLUG rather than PLUG TALK because some of you may have technical suggestions about how we encrypt messages and configure our Linux systems to thrive in the "Post-Quantum World".
The October issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine has a sobering news article: "Cryptographic Standards for a Post-Quantum World" https://spectrum.ieee.org/post-quantum-cryptography-2668949802 BTW, that article should be publically readable; if you cannot access it, you can sign up for free access to IEEE Spectrum and other open-content IEEE journals. I'm an IEEE "life member"; my age plus years of membership exceeds 100. Maybe I will sign up my never-a-member 106-yo father-in-law; he might get six years of back issues. :-) ---- The gist of the article is that large scale quantum computers may not arrive for a decade or two, but when they do, they will be able to crack existing "computationally secure" encryption schemes like RSA, ECC (elliptic curve), PGP, etc. So, NIST is developing Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards based on new methods like "Lattice Cryptography" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice-based_cryptography ... and releasing them for evaluation and testing. BUT THE MAIN POINT OF THE ARTICLE is that all the encrypted files in public cyberspace using current methods will eventually be readable, even without the discovery of a design flaw in those methods. For example, if the encrypted OpenVPN packets between my home network and my Rimuhosting webserver in Dallas are captured and stored by a third party, they may be decrypted in the future. I will probably be dead that happens, but it will occur during the lifetime of younger PLUG members. Bitcoin is built on cryptography. Love it or hate it, it is increasingly woven into the world's monetary systems. Anyway, something to keep in mind, discuss, plan for. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
