When will post quantum resistant HTTPS protocols be a thing?
Some services are slowly developing post quantum resistant protocols for their services like Signal or Tutanota. When will this be a thing for the web?
Oh I fully agree. However, the people that control the purse strings in business will not take IT security seriously until something bad enough happens that it either makes the news or affects them directly.
True. I just think of the hubble program and how what we learned was that there were already a bunch of them pointing at earth. I think quantum computing will be the same. 127 qubit machines are now publicly available… so what’s available to the cia?
Idk if that will ever hit the bank accounts that matter
Using a symmetric pre-shared key based VPN can help mitigate this issue. While the actual HTTPS data will still use non-PQR cryptography, Wireguard’s XChaCha20 and OpenVPN’s AES-256-CBC are considered safe against quantum computers since they don’t use asymmetric cryptography.
Of course, you still need to trust the VPN provider.
Who has an interest in cracking your https traffic to say, lemmy? If it’s a nationstate, they already have access to root private key certs and that attack angle will not be mitigated with “quantum” encryption. If it’s Capitalism, i.e. google-ads or whatever, then it’s a marginal utility issue. If they harvested some of your https traffic from 20 years ago, it’s pretty worthless as far as metadata for ad-targeting etc goes. I don’t really see what “quantum encryption” would gain you.
I’m a nobody, and I don’t expect there’s anyone who wants to access my encrypted traffic, but someone out there is important enough to the right people that would love to get access to that kind of stuff.
Considering this proposal is used for the key exchange, they definitely need to update both the client side and server side part to be able to make use of it. That’s the kind of thing that may take years but luckily it can fall back to older methods.
It also needs to be thoroughly vetted so that’s why it’s a hybrid approach. If the quantum resistant algorithm turns out to have problems (like some others have), they’re still protected by the traditional part like they would have been, with no leaking of all the data.
So how does it work? I guess they exchange keys both ways and then hash them together?
Honestly lattice encryption has been vetted for three decades now. We still can’t say for sure P is not NP, but I’m far more worried about someone getting a quantum computer early than a sudden breakthrough on breaking either kind of algorithm.
The shared secret is calculated as the concatenation of the X25519 shared secret (32 bytes) and the Kyber768Draft00 shared secret (32 bytes). The resulting shared secret value is 64 bytes in length.
Huh. I guess whatever algorithm comes next is resistant to half of the secret being compromised, then.
Edit: It looks like they concatenate things from the two algorithms a few times in the process, so maybe they figure it would be difficult to isolate a vulnerability assuming either one is strong.
Yeah, I feel like it’s going to take both browser vendors shaming sites once a standard is developed/finalized and something like a quantum version of whynohttps.com to drive adoption.
The problem really is the store and decrypt nature of it. It could be used against old data so the time when it needs to be implemented is before it becomes possible to decrypt. I feel like people aren’t good about planning like that and tend to be more reacting to what is currently possible.
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