I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.
Similarly my encrypted internet traffic might be private today but if it’s being logged then it’s only a matter of time before it will be completely visible to the authorities. I probably average ~10Mbps of traffic which is ~50TB/year, or $100 of storage. You could cut that price by 10% if you blacklisted the Netflix traffic, and drop it to 1% if you whitelisted only the email and IM traffic.
Either way, one day they’ll know everything.
Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).
I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta data about where and when a picture was taken and who is in the picture, but I don't care to look through my own pictures, why would anyone else?
> Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares?
I remember some book I read where the child was constantly hearing about his family's history. Dune, maybe? Maybe a Philip Dick book? Asimov? I'm getting old.
People who can profit. And the idea of profit might be different in future.
That attic might contain a priceless vintage synthesizer, that encrypted drive might contain a priceless set of vintage unpublished club penguin screenshots that would make its AI approximation 0.03% more accurate. Etc.
After the death of one of my great uncles who died childless I picked up his photo and music collection. And I discovered the grandfather of a friend of mine in one of his holiday pictures, turns out they used to be friends and we had no idea.
I guess I may be ignoring all those documents that weren’t interesting enough to be remembered, but I imagine it’s hard to predict what will be interesting in the future. The fact that 99% of our lives are stored in computers vs paper would still vastly reduce the number of _interesting_ documents.
Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it.
We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look.
I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.
Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.
I do snap bills and white boards to remember but not with the eager enthusiasm of the long since grown up child.
All the energy released by converting all mass in the solar system into energy apparently gives a hard physical limit just above 2^225 elementary computations before you run out of gas so brute forcing a 256-bit symmetric key seems entirely unfeasible even if all of humanities resources were dedicated to the problem. The calculation is presented here https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/amount-of-... . Waaay out of my field though so this calculation could be off or I could be misunderstanding somehow.
Have a look at this post, which illustrates this reality being true for hash functions (where similar principles as symmetric and asymmetric encryption apply). https://valerieaurora.org/hash.html
Notice Valerie specifically calls out, “Long semi-mathematical posts comparing the complexity of the attack to the number of protons in the universe”.
I think you're making a bit of confusion. hash functions are part of symmetric key cryptography, while asymmetric cryptography is public key cryptography that is very different from hash functions.
In any case, the overall point remains. Short of the one time pad you can’t build a provably flawless scheme.
Big if.
We already knew how to design good and strong symmetric ciphers way back in the 1970s. One of the standard blocking blocks of modern symmetric cipher is called the Feistel network, which was used to create DES. Despite that it's the first widely used encryption standard, even today there's essentially no known flaw in its basic design. It was broken only because the key was artificially weakened to 56 bits. In the 1980s, cryptographers already knew 128 bit really should be the minimum security standard in spite of what NSA officially claimed. In the 1990s, when faster computers meant more overhead was acceptable, people agreed that symmetric ciphers should have an extra 256-bit option to protect them from any possible future breakthrough.
There are only two possible ways to break them, perhaps people will eventually find a flaw in Feistel network ciphers to enable classical attacks against all security levels, but it would require a groundbreaking mathematical breakthrough unimaginable today, so it's possible but unlikely. Another route is quantum computing. If it's possible to build a large quantum computer, all 128-bit ciphers will eventually be brute-forced by Glover's algorithm. On the other hand, 256-bit ciphers will still be immune (and people already put this defense in place long before post-quantum cryptography became a serious research topic).
Thus, if you want a future archeologist from the 23rd century to decrypt your data, only use 128-bit symmetric ciphers.
Namely I’d ask when not if. My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won’t come up with provably unbreakable schemes.
The big assumption of cryptography is that, there exists some problems that are not provably unsolvable but difficult enough for almost any practical purposes. To engineers, no assumption can be more reasonable than that. Given unlimited time, it's a provable fact that any (brand new) processor with asynchronous input signal will malfunction due to metastability in digital circuits, it's also a provable fact that metastability is a fundamental flaw in all digital electronics - but computers still work because the MTBF can be made as large as necessary, longer than the lifetime of the Solar system if you really want to.
So the only problem here is, how long is the MTBF of today's building blocks of symmetric ciphers? If it's on the scale of 100 years or so, sure, everything is breakable if you're patient. If it's on the scale of 1000 years, well, breaking it is "only" a matter of time. But if it's on the scale of 10000 years, I don't believe it's relevant to the human civilization (as we know it) anymore - your standard may vary.
The problem is that computerized cryptography is a young subject, the best data we have so far is symmetric ciphers tend to be more secure than asymmetric ones. We know that Feistel networks have an excellent safety record and remain unbroken after 50 years. We also know that we can break almost all widely used asymmetric ciphers today with large quantum computers if we can build one, but we can't do the same to symmetric ones - even the ancient DES is unbreakable if it's redesigned to use 256-bit keys. So while nobody knows for sure, but most rational agents will certainly assign higher and higher confidence every year - until a breakthrough occurs.
> My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won’t come up with provably unbreakable schemes.
Many mathematicians and some physicists may prefer a higher standard of security than "lowly" practical engineers. This is the main motivation behind quantum cryptography - rather than placing security on empirical observations, its slogan is that the security is placed on the laws of physics. Many have pointed that the this slogan is misleading: any practical form of quantum cryptography must exist in the engineering sense, and there will certainly be some forms of security flaws such as sensor imperfection or at least side channels... That being said, I certainly understand why it looks so attractive to many people if you're the kind of person who really worry about provability.
Agreed. My overall / initial point was that I can’t say the time to crack = the time to brute force and start talking about the age of the universe. Even if we had to wait 10,000 years for cryptanalysis to break AES, it’s a blink of an eye in sideral timescale.
> quantum cryptography
Quantum cryptography is helpful in detecting eavesdropping (due to the no clone theorem). Ie quantum cryptography is helpful in avoiding asymmetric encryption for key exchange when communicating with symmetric encryption. Eg BB84. And given asymmetric encryption is most vulnerable to quantum attacks (compared to symmetric), quantum cryptography improves today’s state of the art. BUT, I insist that none of this gives provably uncrackable schemes.
AND it might be that we never build such a scheme. After all we have Godel’s incompleteness theorem lying around.
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...
Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false dichotomy.
Not necessairly. This still costs:
• Programmer/development time to implement save/restore/transfer
• Time on new hardware, bottlenecked by old hardware, restoring a partial computation from old disks or networks
You're not going to waste time restoring partial calculations for anything from an Amiga cluster for time saving purpouses. Additionally, this scheme ties up hardware that then can't be used for "cost effective to finish on current hardware" calculations.
Though this does assume that X is a constant, or at least bounded below by a constant. If hardware performance improved up to an asymptote, then there would still be nonzero improvement, but it might not be enough for waiting to ever be worth it.
If your disagreement is that a constant is not appropriate here, consider the interpretation in this comparison of running a program on a slower computer A and then a faster computer B. There would be a constant difference in performance between these two computers, assuming they are in working order. So, taking the model with a single constant is appropriate for this example.
If you are saying the performance improvement is bounded below by a constant, I would ask you, what is the domain of this function? Time? So we would be talking about continuously moving a computation between different computers? The only line here is a best fit line, emergent data, so I don't understand how this could be a preferred way to talk about the situation (the alternate to an assumption), because this is suggesting the emergent structure with nice continuity features is a preferred fundamental understanding of the situation, but it's not.
Then, where you are talking about hardware performance improving up to a (assuming horizontal) asymptote. I guess this means "If hardware performance increase becomes marginal[1], there is a nonzero improvement." Or in other words, "If hardware performance increase is marginal, there is a marginal [performance] increase". Performance and improvement are both rates of change, so this is tautological.
Finally, you state that waiting for such a marginal near-zero performance increase isn't worth it. I think most people would agree this is obvious if said in simpler terms. However, this is still not disagreeing with me, because I never suggested waiting was worth it.
So, what's the disagreement?
[1] which is well-established not to be the case, so I don't think this is a relevant case to the interesting factoid about waiting to start computation
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapfr...