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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Are we already talking about attackers having access to quantum computers?

I could see government agencies with a big budget having access to it, but I don't see those computers becoming mainstream

Although I could see China having access to it, which is problem.

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The migration here is going to be long.

Chrome and Cloudflare are doing a MTC experiment this year. We'll work on standardizing over the next year. Let's Encrypt may start adding support the year after that. Downstream software might start deploying support MTCs the year after that. People using LTS Linux distros might not upgrade software for another 5 years after that. People run out-of-date client devices for another 5 years too.

So even in that timeline, which is about as fast as any internet-scale migration goes, it may be 10-15 years from today for MTC support to be fully widespread.

Yeah, this is going to take time. That is why we're starting now.

The fear is attackers are recording conversations today in the hopes that they can crack the encryption when we do have quantum computers in a few years

Capture-now Decrypt-later isn't really relevant to certificates, who mostly exist to defend against active MITM. The key exchange algorithms need to be PQ-secure for CN-DL, but that has already happened if you have an up-to-date client and server.

No. Nobody serious that I know of thinks Q-day has occurred or will occur in 2025. The more typical question is whether we're 10, 50, or 100 years away from it.

I’m of the opinion that it’s unlikely to happen within 50 years.

But I still think it’s a good idea to start switching over to post-quantum encryption, because the lead time is so high. It could easily take a full 10 years to fully implement the transition and we don’t want to be scrambling to start after Q-day.

> 10 years

Moving from SHA-1 to SHA-2 took ~20 years - and that's the "happy path", because SHA-2 is a drop-in replacement.

The post-quantum transition is more complex: keys and signatures are larger; KEM is a cryptographic primitive with a different interface; stateful signature algorithms require special treatment for state handling. It can easily take more than 20 years.

> Although I could see China having access to it, which is problem.

I can see USA having access to it, which is also a problem. Or any other government.

Seems like you answered your own question

How is China having access to it any different than, say, America?

I trust american institutions more than I trust chinese institutions

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