NSA Plans to Develop Encryption That Could Stump Quantum Computers

Because of the NSA'S ability to scoop up the most brilliant cryptographers, they're one of the few powerhouses that have the ability to put together a team effort to accomplish this.

Unfortunately, they've shown in the past a clear desire to sabotage implementations to include weaknesses that only they or perhaps other large state actors can take advantage of.

Any implementation of a quantum-resistant cryptography will face a large uphill battle in terms of trust.

It would be interesting to see how some crypto implementations would respond to a quantum attack. I know some implementations that give you back a different message for each key tried, so with a quantum attack there is the possibility of similar-looking messages been shown. So for example, I encrypt a picture of a sunflower, and when running a quantum attack, I get back two different images of a sunflower, and the attacker must then infer which one is the 'encrypted' one and which one is noise. Also why have time horizon solutions/attacks when we already have stego?

-> Quantum computers, once seen as a remote theoretical possibility, are now widely expected to work within five to 30 years.

Not my field of expertise so forgive the ignorance, but am I wrong to think that "five to 30 years" seems like a large spread? How close are we really to quantum computing?

The NSA are doing this now?

I was friends with someone in TCD (Ireland) who did this work >3 years ago.