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Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.

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[+] -27 points 1 year ago (20 children)

Having in mind we are not even close to breaking classical cryptography with quantum computing I doubt this was their best investment of time

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There are nation states just straight up intercepting and storing signal data on their networks in hopes that it can be decrypted in the future. 20 year old messages will still be useful.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Their core feature is secure messaging, so I'd say this result highlights their dedication to the secure aspect of it. So an excellent feature in terms of branding, and probably has more benefits in other places e.g. attracting talent, as developers now can see Signal offers great opportunities to work on complex problems.

    So I'm curious; what do you think would be better investment of their time?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Like allowing a federated system instead of a central one, not depending in external libraries and services, and so on. I bet there are many things that would actually improve the security instead of this that is more of a marketing point.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago

    the best time was yesterday. the next best time is today. securing systems after they're broken, when data could actively be collected prior to the breakthrough, is not the way to approach security.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Once quantum computers break classical cryptography, it's going to be too late to develop post-quantum cryptography, mate.

    The best time to develop resilience is right now.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    It's not going to happen this century, probably never

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Even if quantum computing turns out to actually be infeasible and classical cryptography is secure for the next millennia, it's still a good feature to have a third independent encryption layer in the protocol. It makes it that much less likely reliant on the other two being bulletproof.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    How sure are you? Assign a percentage chance to it and the cost of exposing old messages, and compare that to the cost of this dev effort.

    We know governments are using it, and there's likely a lot of sensitive data transmitted through Signal, so the cost of it happening in the next 20 years would still be substantial, so even if the chance of that timeline happening is small, there's still value in investing in forward secrecy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    They also want nuclear fusion reactors and there is none in the horizon after 50 years of research and development (even though many want to sell the idea that there are).

    You can start preparing for post hypercomputation cryptography too if you believe your argument.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Lol, it shows the hype quantum computing has sold and how detached the public thought is about it from reality.

    I'm friends with two quantum computing researchers and they are pretty sure quantum computing will never be a practical application because of how the noise and errors scale with the system size.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    The quantum computing hype is really annoying but we don't know the future. One day there might be a breakthrough in noise reduction. I'd rather signal have post-quantum cryptography and not need it than get blindsided if there is suddenly a qc that can break rsa with shor. Not to mention intelligence agencies doing store now/decrypt later stuff.

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