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Comment by cwmma | Hacker News Reader

Don't rush to improve chicken coop, warns local fox

It's an intentionally misleading title to get clicks. The actual context of the quote refers to the fact that encryption methods built in too much of a rush may introduce other vulnerabilities. This article has no substance or constructive purpose.

I read this title as "NSA thinks they are getting close to enough qbits to mount real attacks, please don't switch to PQC before we get a return on our investment!"

In other news, your totally-trustworthy not-at-all-compromised neighborhood NIST is working on new PQC algs!

If this was the case why does the NSA issue warnings about things from time to time?

Because by then other intelligence agencies or mere commoners can also break the crypto.

Great metaphor. I hope the right people (academics, crypto authors, etc.) don't get deterred from reviewing this in earnest, but for lay people like myself, I cannot help but feel as you do.

I feel like the irony here is that, assuming the director of the NSA is even minimally self-aware, there's actually no way for me to know whether this is:

a) an attempt to prevent me from using encryption they can't yet break

- or -

b) reverse-psychology, assuming that a halfway intelligent person would guess this was a case of A, therefore prematurely switching to an untested quantum crypto that they might actually have an _easier_ time breaking.

and honestly, either way I'm left with no actionable information.

Why not a third option, that the research director of the NSA is giving her honest informed opinion?

Because that would be ignoring over 25 years of documented history.

Both are true because this is a government official. A key skill for a government official is to communicate in a way that gives no information to people who disagree with them. This is a sensible adaptation to their conditions. You disagree with this government official. And for that reason you gain no information from them.

How about c) making NSA's adversaries nervous by indirectly suggesting that they might be able to break current crypto and monitoring how different parties sending encrypted traffic react to this "information" to discover interesting/high value targets?

Side channel information exposure attack against human targets.

You've got to give them enough time to dig a tunnel underneath.

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