[Cryptography] quantum computers & crypto

[Viktor Dukhovni]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 09:03:26AM -0700, Ron Garret wrote:

> 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.

It seems to me that what matters in banking is reserves and the
integrity of the books.  Encryption is rather less important than not
having your records tampered with by unauthorised parties, especially
insiders.

Now settlement systems are a different story, if you can compromise
Swift, you can make rather a mess, though again attacks go after weak
process controls, not the crypto.

Swiss secrecy laws aside, the future compromise of no longer used keys
does not look like a banking threat, so banks don't need to have
their crypto safe for 20+ years.  Just till the keys are rotated.

-- 
    Viktor.