Quantum Crypto

[Perry E.Metzger]

There have been more press releases about quantum crypto products
lately.

I will summarize my opinion simply -- even if they can do what is
advertised, they aren't very useful. They only provide link security,
and at extremely high cost. You can easily just run AES+HMAC on all
the bits crossing a line and get what is for all practical purposes
similar security, at a fraction of the price.

The problem in security is not that we don't have crypto technologies
that are good enough -- our algorithms are fine. Our real problem is
in much more practical things like getting our software to high enough
assurance levels, architectural flaws in our systems, etc.

Thus, Quantum Crypto ends up being a very high priced way to solve
problems that we don't have.


Perry

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