It will be interesting to compare PQ rollout to HTTPS rollout historically (either the "SSL becomes widespread in 2015" thing, or the deprecation SSL 3.0). Cloudflare is in an easy position to do stuff like this because it can decouple end user/browser upgrade cycles from backend upgrade cycles.<p>Some browsers and some end user devices get upgraded quickly, so making it easy to make it optionally-PQ on any site, and then as that rollout extends, some specialty sites can make it mandatory, and then browser/device UX can do soft warnings to users (or other activity like downranking), and then at some point something like STS Strict can be exposed, and then largely become a default (and maybe just remove the non-PQ algorithms entirely from many sites).<p>I definitely was on team "the risks of a rushed upgrade might outweigh the risks of actual quantum breaks" until pretty recently -- rushing to upgrade has lots of problems always and is a great way to introduce new bugs, but based on the latest information, the balance seems to have shifted to doing an upgrade quickly.<p>Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).
If any kind of proof about serious quantum computers comes to light, browsers can force most websites' hand by marking non-PQ ciphers as insecure.<p>Maybe it'll require TLS 1.4/QUIC 2, with no changes but the cipher specifications, but it can happen in two or three years. Certificates themselves don't last longer than a year anyway. Corporations running ancient software that doesn't support PQ TLS will have the same configuration options to ignore the security warnings already present for TLS 1.0/plain HTTP connections.<p>The biggest problem I can imagine is devices talking to the internet no longer receiving firmware updates. If the web host switches protocols, the old clients will start dying off en masses.
No need for a TLS 1.4.<p>Leaf certificates don't last long, but root CAs do. An attacker can just mint new certs from a broken root key.<p>Hopefully many devices can be upgraded to PQ security with a firmware update. Worse than not receiving updates, is receiving malicious firmware updates, which you can't really prevent without upgrading to something safe first.
There is no reason to not support non quantum safe algorithms for foreseeable future in the first place
Waiting now means rushing even more close to the deadline! We added stats on origin support for post-quantum encryption. Not as much support as browsers of course, but better than I expected. Still a long road (and authentication!). <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum" rel="nofollow">https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum</a>
> Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).<p>IPv6 deserves a prominent spot there
Cloudflare pushing PQ by default is probably the single most impactful thing that can happen for adotpion. Most developers will never voluntarily migrate their TLS config. Making it the default at the CDN layer means millions of sites get upgraded without anyone making a decision
You can do PQ queries with us at qi.rt.ht!<p>Which one do you think is PQ-secure?<p><a href="https://qi.rt.ht/?pq={api.,}{stripe,paypal}.com" rel="nofollow">https://qi.rt.ht/?pq={api.,}{stripe,paypal}.com</a>
Does this mean we should be migrating our SSH keys to post-quantum crypto right now?
> news.ycombinator.com:443 is using X25519, which is not post-quantum secure.<p>This is the result of Cloudflare's test "Check if a host supports post-quantum TLS key exchange" offered on <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum" rel="nofollow">https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum</a>.<p>Hoping there is already a migration plan. Fortunately many modern tools make it easy to switch to PQ, maybe someone knows which stack HN is running and if it would be possible.
Along similar lines, Mozilla recently updated their recommended server-side TLS configuration to enable the X25519MLKEM768 post-quantum key exchange now that it's making it into actually-deployed software versions: <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS</a> At the same time they removed their "old client" compatibility profile as newer TLS libraries do not implement the necessary algorithms (or at least do not enable them by default) and slightly tweaked the "intermediate" compatibility profile to remove a fallback necessary for IE 11 on Windows 7 (now Windows 10 is the minimum compatible version for that profile).
Any information on future CPU's with support for hardware accelerated PQC algorithms? Will all my old devices become slow when PQC is the norm and encrypted communication is no longer hardware accelerated?
Only the asymmetric portion of the cryptography (which is only used in the handshake) will need to use PQC algorithms. Symmetric crypto algorithms (AES/ChaCha20/SHA-*), which are used after the handshake, are not as badly affected by quantum computing so they're not being replaced in the immediate term. I'm pretty sure that general purpose CPUs do not have hardware acceleration for the asymmetric crypto anyways.
you don't really need that tbh. you can get pretty good speedups using standard (vector) intrinsics. the new algorithms are (mostly) modular linear algebra (+ some concept of "noise").
Is this still theory or are there working Quantum systems that have broken anything yet?
Among cryptography engineers there was a sharp vibe shift over the last 2 months; there are papers supporting that vibe shift, but there's also a rumor mill behind it too. The field has basically aligned fully in a way it hadn't before that this is an urgent concern. The simplest way to put it is that everyone's timeline for a real-world CRQC has shortened. Not everyone has the same timeline, but all those timelines are now shorter, and for some important (based on industry and academic position) practitioners, it's down to "imminent".
It's theory. The concern is for avoiding a (likely, IMO) scenario where the only real indication that someone cracked QC is one or more teams of researchers in the field going dark because they got pulled into some tight-lipped NSA project. If we wait until we have an unambiguous path to QC, it might well be too late.<p>To avoid the scenario where for a prolonged period of time the intelligence community has secret access to QC, researchers against that type of thing are incentivized to shout fire when they see the glimmerings of a possibly productive path of research.
> <i>one or more teams of researchers in the field going dark</i><p>If the intelligence community is going to nab the first team that has a quantum computing breakthrough, does it actually help the public to speed up research?<p>It seems like an arms race the public is destined to lose because the winning team will be subsumed no matter what.
It's the same logic as any offensive technology: maybe the world would be a better place if we never invented the technology, but we can't risk our enemies having it while we don't, and even if they never develop it maybe it'll help us, and we're the good guys.<p>Luckily, in this particular arms race, all we the public need to do is swap encryption algorithms, and there's no risk of ending global civilization if we mess up. So we get the best of both worlds: Quantum computing for civilian purposes (simulations and whatnot), while none of the terrifying surveillance capabilities. We just need to update a couple of libraries.
still theory, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that quantum systems capable of real-world attacks are closer to fruition than most people generally assumed.<p>Filippo Valsorda (maintainer of Golang's crypto packages, among other things) published a summary yesterday [0] targeted at relative laypeople, with the same "we need to target 2029" bottom line.<p>0: <a href="https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/" rel="nofollow">https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/</a>
Nothing has been broken yet, however data can be collected now and be cracked when the time comes, hence why there is a push.
Theory. And afaik there are still questions as to if the PQ algorithms are actually secure.
there are no meaningful questions. The only way there are meaningful questions is if you think global cryptographers + governments are part of a cabal to build insecure schemes. The new schemes use<p>1. cryptography developed across the world,
2. the actual schemes were overwhelmingly by European authors
3. standardized by the US
4. other countries standardizations have been substantially similar (e.g. the ongoing Korean one, the German BSI's recommendations. China's CACR [had one with substantially similar schemes](<a href="https://www.sdxcentral.com/analysis/china-russia-to-adopt-slightly-different-pqc-standards-from-us/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sdxcentral.com/analysis/china-russia-to-adopt-sl...</a>). Note that this is separate from a "standardization", which sounds like it is starting soon).<p>In particular, given that China + the US ended up with (essentially the same) underlying math, you'd have to have a <i>very weird</i> hypothetical scenario for the conclusion to not be "these seem secure", and instead "there is a global cabal pushing insecure schemes".
There are not in fact meaningful questions about whether the settled-on PQC constructions are secure, in the sense of "within the bounds of our current understanding of QC".
tbf - since we still don't know if p != np, there are still questions about if the current algorithms are secure also.
Fair, but recently several PQ algorithms have been shown to in fact not be secure, with known attacks, so I wouldn’t equate them
Outside of the PQ algorithms not being as thoroughly vetted as others, is there any negatives to shifting algorithms? Like even if someone were to prove that quantum computing is a dud, is there any reason why we shouldn't be using this stuff anyway?
they are much more thoroughly vetted than other schemes. They're more thoroughly vetted than elliptic curves were before we deployed them. Much more vetted than RSA was ever.<p>Practically though, there are some downsides. Elliptic curves tend to have smaller ciphertexts/keys/signatures/so are better on bandwidth. If you do everything right with elliptic curves, we're also more confident in the hardness of the underlying problems (cf "generic group lower bounds", and other extensions of this model).<p>The new algorithms tend to be easier to implement (important, as a <i>big</i> source of practical insecurity is implementation issues. historically much more than the underlying assumption breaking). This isn't uniformly, e.g. I still think that the FN-DSA algorithm will have issues of this type, but ML-DSA and ML-KEM are fine. They're also easier to "specify", meaning it is much harder to accidentally choose a "weak" instance of them (in several senses. the "weak curve" attacks are not really possible. there isn't really a way to hide a NOBUS backdoor like there was for DUAL_EC_DRBG). They also tend to be faster.
Post-quantum algorithms tend to be slower than existing elliptic curve algorithms and require more data to be exchanged to provide equivalent security against attacks run on non-quantum computers.
The CDN part is the easy half. In my work the harder problem has most often been internal service mesh, mTLS between services, any infra that doesn’t terminate at a CDN. Has a bad habit of longer certificate lifetimes and older TLS stacks, and nobody is upgrading it for you.
Quantum computing, and the generic term 'quantum' is gearing up to be the next speculative investment hype bubble after AI, so prepare for a lot of these kinds of articles
nah. governments around the world are hoovering up traffic today with the hope of a "cheap" (by nation state standards) quantum computer. Some of the secrets sent today are "evergreen" (i.e are still relevant 10+ years into the future), amongst a whole lot of cruft. There is massive incentive to hide the technology to keep your peers transmitting in vulnerable encryption as long as possible.
At least it's time bound: hope to have this job done by 2029!
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And that changes what?
If we do our job, it changes nothing. Problem with security generally: no spectacle if it's all correct. :)
"Nothing happened for y2k" energy
It would mean that they're future-proofing their security
The secrecy around this is precisely the opposite of what we saw in the 90s when it started to become clear DES needed to go. Yet another sign that the global powers are preparing for war.
What do you mean? For as long as I remember (back to late 1994) people understood DES to be inadequate; we used DES-EDE and IDEA (and later RC4) instead. What "secrecy" would there have been? The feasibility of breaking DES given a plausible budget goes all the way back to the late 1970s. The first prize given for <i>demonstrating</i> a DES break was only $10,000.
Triple-key DES (DES-EDE) had already been proposed by IBM in 1979, in response to the criticism that the 56-bit keys of DES are far too short.<p>So practically immediately after DES was standardized, people realized that NSA had crippled it by limiting the key length to 56 bits, and they started to use workarounds.<p>Before introducing RC2 and RC4 in 1987, Ronald Rivest had used since 1984 another method of extending the key length of DES, named DESX, which was cheaper than DES-EDE as it used a single block cipher function invocation. However, like also RC4, DESX was kept as a RSA trade secret, until it was leaked, also like RC4, during the mid nineties.<p>IDEA (1992, after a preliminary version was published in 1991) was the first block cipher function that was more secure than DES and which was also publicly described.
People were willing to explicitly explain why it was inadequate rather than keep it secret. That is the difference.
My read of the recent google blog post is that they <i>framed</i> it as cryptocurrency related stuff just so they don't say the silent thing out loud. But lots of people "in the know" / working on this are taking it much more seriously than just cryptobros go broke. So my <i>hunch</i> is that there's more to it and they didn't want to say it / couldn't / weren't allowed to.
It should be noted that quantum computers are a threat mainly for interactions between unrelated parties which perform legal activities, e.g. online shopping, online banking, notarized legal documents that use long-term digital signatures.<p>Quantum computers are not a threat for spies or for communications within private organizations where security is considered very important, where the use of public-key cryptography can easily be completely avoided and authentication and session key exchanges can be handled with pre-shared secret keys used only for that purpose.
I will bring this up at the next meeting of the secret cryptographer cabal where we decide what information to reveal to non-cryptographers.
What is "it" that you're referring to?