We used to do all kinds of crazy stuff with pen and paper or funky mechanical tools.
But then along comes Horst Feistel at IBM and just makes it sooo boring. Everything is computers!
Security tokens are sooo boring. Give me back a code wheel and make me do some crap with a cryptex or something.
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I’ve always thought some new form of one-time pad would be interesting in the age of digital mass storage. I guess it would be kind of annoying to have to manage occasional exchanges of pad data with anyone you want to have secure communication with, but it is a simple concept for people to understand.
There was a big concern over quantum computing breaking all the common cryptography recently, is that still a thing?
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The political economy of this exploit would be very different. Once a zero-day is publicized, it is ripe to be exploited by any script kiddy in the world. If conventional encryption were broken by quantum computers, the exploit would require access to some of the most expensive fixed capital in the world to execute in each instance. It would not spread like wildfire. It would be a very closely guarded state secret.
There was a big concern over quantum computing breaking all the common cryptography recently, is that still a thing?
It is. Many services now taut post-quantum cryptography as it’s believed by many that functional quantum computers will be a reality withing the next few years.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/yikes-encryptions-y2k-moment-coming-years-early
From my (relatively lay) understanding, the mechanism used to break encryption using quantum computers works by reducing the complexity of factorization from exponential time to polynomial time. The largest number known to be factored using this method is 15.
It doesn’t hurt to adopt post-quantum algorithms, but I doubt the technology is coming in the near future. Not from our education system, anyway. Maybe it could have happened if we sunk trillions into that instead of the magic conch.
In principle quantum computers could break many modern asymmetrical ciphers, such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. Although, there are a few caveats.
- This depends upon being able to build a quantum computer with extraordinarily large numbers of qubits. Current development trends are so slow that if this does occur, it could take decades. Unless a major breakthrough is announced tomorrow, we are not anywhere near seeing widespread breaking up encryption via quantum computers.
- This is also entirely new empirical territory, applying quantum theory to a regime it has never been tested. While nothing in our current models suggest it is impossible, our current models have never been applied in these regimes before. There are hypothetical models in the literature, like rational quantum mechanics, which predict a breakdown in our predictions in these regimes, and so we cannot be 100% certain that building a large-scale quantum computer is even possible.
- We’ve already developed post-quantum cryptography, which consists of asymmetrical ciphers that are not known to be defeated by quantum computers, and so, worse comes to worse, we already have replacements to solve the problem. The main issue will be companies that are slow to upgrade, or companies which have upgraded but someone has collected a bunch of encrypted traffic for the purpose of unencrypting it the distant future.
My point is that it’s a real concern, but it’s not exactly absolutely certain that quantum computers will break modern encryption, but it is indeed a possibility we should be worried about, but at the same time, we’ve already developed methods to avoid it. So, it’s a possibility, that we’ve already developed the tools to mitigate. Some browsers, like Firefox, already include support for post-quantum cryptography, and so if you are a business that is worried about it, you can just use those ciphers in your HTTPS and then there is no worry.
