Hacker News Reader

How about a web browser?

The Nytimes.com front page is 4.66 MB. A Quantum McEliece key is 8373911 bits (per wikipedia) or almost exactly 1MB. Therefore if my connection to Nytimes.com was over McEliece based TLS -- it would be a 21% bandwidth increase. I doubt I would notice.

View on HN

How much of that do you have to download before browser does first paint? With a key handshake you would have to do it before any content is displayed. In much of the modern web (for people blessed with fast connections) latency is much more important than bandwidth. An extra 1mb right upfront might be very different from an extra mb overall. Especially when tcp slow start is taken into account.

Even more so if the webpage is loading stuff from many different domains

You have to consider that web browsers run on IoT devices now and shouldn’t be excluded from security.

I honestly doubt that an IoT device capable of displaying a modern fancy site and running bloated things like webkit would have trouble using Classic McEliece.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com