[Cryptography] quantum computers & crypto

[Ron Garret]

On Oct 28, 2021, at 9:42 PM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:

> Joshua Marpet <Joshua.Marpet at guardedrisk.com> writes:
> 
>> I literally just (yesterday) had a conversation with a financial institution
>> about this. They have a firm that does periodical updates to them of "what's
>> coming", and they were told that in 2022, they better have budget for quantum
>> decryption defense. Otherwise, they're behind the curve!!
> 
> Banking is a bit special, I talked to a banking security person many years ago
> about why they were mandating ludicrous-speed algorithms and key sizes and he
> said that even though they know that X is safe, they have to be extremely
> conservative and will therefore mandate additional unnecessary Y even though
> they know it's, well, not necessary.  You can see examples of this in many of
> the X9 standards.
> 
> So finance is more of a Ripley's odditorium of crypto than something to
> emulate.  They have their reasons for doing things, but they're operating in a
> very different world than the rest of us.

Just to put this in perspective, if someone actually broke the encryption used by banks, it would quite literally be the end of civilization as we know it.  So the stakes are quite high and so their paranoia is not entirely unjustified.

rg