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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Link to the actual legislation: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227

So, whoa - I hadn't even heard of this. Had y'all?

$1.2B on an exotic tech field - with implications that bigly threaten online privacy and security - seems like an incredible thing to get through both houses and signed into law without it being a story in these parts.

Amash unsurprisingly voted no (joining only 10 others in the house, while 348 voted aye). A quick perusal of his twitter doesn't show me any of his thoughts on it. I'd like to hear them.

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>with implications that bigly threaten online privacy and security

Well, it never hurts to start researching post-quantum crypto even if large quantum computers were to prove impractical. I recall Google ran an experiment with a post-quantum key exchange algorithm [1], though I have no clue what came of said experiment.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2016/07/experimenting-with-p...

This is ongoing, and Microsoft and Google continued browser experiments with another algorithm (paper titled "Frodo: Take off the ring! Practical, Quantum-Secure Key Exchange from LWE") https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/659 - you can also see a recent video from DEF CON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCdaYAFx7hw

In both cases, they are using a type of lattice-based cryptography known as LWE (learning with errors).

It is always an arms race.

India now allows the government to decrypt personal data:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/india-authorizes-10-agencies-t...

If anything it should tell us that Crypto works(for us whose math skills may not be up to the task) and there are not as many backdoors as technologies in the past.

Fortunately, post quantum crypto is pretty far along-- meaning cryptographic primitives that cannot be broken by quantum computing.

The cryptography challenge has seen huge progress; a surprising amount of it from one guy, DJB, an absolute legend.

What remains is a hard software engineering and standardization challenge: upgrading our apps and protocols to use quantum secure crypto.

https://pqcrypto.org

There have been a considerable number of other people involved: the complete list of people in the NIST post-quantum submission teams is pretty big.

There was a bit of discussion back when this bill was introduced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524928

>>$1.2B on an exotic tech field - with implications that bigly threaten online privacy and security

Probably more than that...even regular computer threaten privacy and security, in 0.2 seconds they scan all faces or fingerprints in the world.

Congress probably doesn't want USA to be left behind.

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