[Cryptography] Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks

[Peter Gutmann]

Aram Perez via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> writes:

>Here are my comments:

Thanks!  I tried numbering the slides but there's a bug in Powerpoint when
going from a .ppt template to .pptx slides where it omits the numbering.
Apparently it's been known for about 15 years, I'm sure Microsoft will have a
fix out any day now.

Some notes for the other parts, there are various details that are in the talk
but not on the slides so I'll also add a notes page at the end to address the
issues you've raised (as well as the mention of the Red Queen problem) for
people reading the slides:

>* Several of the figures/tables are not legible (pages 4, 5, 10)

The OWASP stuff?  They're not necessarily meant to be read, particularly the
"full breakdown" table, just to illustrate that things haven't changed much in
twenty-odd years.

>* Slide 2 - Does that cannon have a name? I’m assuming Schwerer Gustav was
>the creator/inventor.

Gustav Schwerer, little-known weapons designer alongside Hugo Panzer and Georg
Stuka :-).  Actually it means "Heavy Gustav", after Gustav von Krupp, it being
a Krupp product.

>* Slide 6 - I’m not sure what “Light aircraft but could carry bombs — just”.
>If the conventional artillery was called “Rochling shells”, what were the
>shells for this giant cannon called?

The aircraft that were used with the gun were Fieseler Fi.165 "Storch" spotter
aircraft, notable for being able to take off and land in places nothing else
could (for example on a rocky mountaintop if you wanted to rescue an Italian
dictator being held there) and fly at treetop height below the stall speed of
the aircraft attacking them.  They could in theory carry a small bomb load and
thus also in theory could have "got the boom from A to B", although in
practice you'd use almost anything else for the job.

Röchling shells were what today would be called bunker-buster shells, fin-
stablised discarding-sabot subcalibre munitions with a length measured in
metres that could penetrate ten metres of solid rock and several metres of
reinforced concrete but could also be fired from conventional towed artillery
like 21cm howitzers.  So you could do the job with off-the-shelf equipment and
didn't need a supergun at all.

>* Slide 7 - I’m not sure who your audience is but will they know what OWASP is?

Good point, will expand the abbreviation.  OWASP stands for "Open Source
Foundation for Application Security", like ACM their naming has changed a bit
since it was initially founded.

>* Slides 51 and 53 basically repeat the same warning.

Yeah, I need to fix up slide 53.

>* Slide 56 - Scribble only barked 3 times, I though he barked 5 times ;-)

Good point, it was three to match, five to exceed, so I'll make it five.

In practice Scribble is very well trained and virtually never barks, so his
owner had to play with him with a ball for awhile to get him to bark.  It was
a command performance just for the slides :-).

Peter.