[Cryptography] Some quantum computers might need more power than supercomputers

[Kent Borg]

On 1/10/26 2:04 PM, Jon Callas wrote:
> This is an incredibly good thing about the state of modern security. I'd be willing in a debate to argue the side that the relevance-uncertainty makes collect-now-decrypt-later to be a losing strategy because detecting relevance is a harder problem than decrypting.

I like your point, but then we are reminded by Jason Cooper 
<cryptography at lakedaemon.net>:

> Those 7 trillion keys each have metadata associated with them.  Source and
> destination IP addresses, timestamps, port numbers.


We are in a golden age of surveillance through traffic analysis (though 
that term seems to have gone out of fashion). Who needs to decode 
anything when the record of who talked to whom when and where is so 
complete? And when one does want to put effort into decoding, the likely 
juicy targets are pretty well narrowed down. Look at packet size and 
timing to characterize further what packets are worth decoding.


On 1/10/26 2:04 PM, Jon Callas also wrote:

> I'm not really sure how much I believe this point, but I'd sure be willing to debate it.
I know the feeling.


-kb