[Cryptography] The race to Quantum machines.

[Tom Mitchell]

On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 8:46 AM Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:

>
> On May 29, 2019, at 6:34 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> .....

> All I’m saying is that, given the above facts, betting the future of
> digital security on the hypothesis that QM fails before it gets to the
> point where you can implement Shor’s algorithm is unwise.
>



> anything outside of the system (and note that entanglement is not an
> all-or-nothing phenomenon.  Entanglement is a continuum.)  When that
> happens, the system considered in isolation is no longer in a pure state
> and can no longer self-interfere.  The more degrees of freedom a system
> has, the harder it becomes as a practical matter to keep all of them
> isolated from (i.e. prevent them from becoming entangled with) their
> environment.  It really is just as simple as that.
>
> The assumption here seems to be that the only reason to build quantum
> computers is to break RSA.
>
>
> No, the assumption is that breaking RSA will be catastrophic, and so the
> prospect of developing QC is a cause for concern in the context of a
> discussion list dedicated to cryptography.  I certainly never meant to
> imply that that’s the *only* reason anyone should care about quantum
> computing, but it’s certainly *a* reason.
>

Missing in this discussion is the design of processors (silicon layout and
design)  by more modest quantum computers and design of quantum machines
themselves.
i.e.  A difficult problem today is the optimization of programming
languages and hardware description languages.

Currently computation has been moved by silicon advances but some difficult
problems will fall to clever insights.
The book "Programming Perls" is a good reminder that algorithms and
insights can change expectations.
An attacker has control of data in and the public key so there is a lot of
leverage in the hands of a determined
decryption effort attempting to discover the private key.

The window of risk is a long way out for some data.

BTW: this has been educational.  I learned a lot from this, thank you all.

-- 
   T o m    M i t c h e l l
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