You don’t need to bring up quantum computers. Almost all protocols in the networking industry are basically running with a shared secret that is service global. Pop any box at all and you have the world for any traffic you can capture.

The problem with the shared secret model isn’t that it can be stolen, it’s that it is globally shared within a provider network. You can’t root it in a hardware device. You can’t do forensics to see from what node it was stolen.

We are talking about an industry where they still connect console servers, often to serial terminal aggregators that are on the internal network alongside the management Ethernet ports, which have dumb guessable passwords, often the same one on every box, that all their bottom tier overseas contractors know.

It’s just sad.