# Quantum Computing



## Phishfry (May 29, 2019)

I have done some light reading on Quantum Computers and while I lean on the skeptical side I do wonder if the US government could already have them without any fanfair? Would such advancements be possible in secret? I mean very large quibid machines?
The engineering involved seems immense and I would think any revolutionary advances would be hard to conceal but the security services black budget is not small.


			https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/05/28/honeywell-one-step-closer-to-universal-quantum-computer/
		

How will we know when common encryption is threatened?


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## ralphbsz (May 30, 2019)

A: The secrecy of governments is not as good as people believe. Rumors would come out, or whistleblowers would announce it.
B: Even if a government agency were able to decrypt communications by brute-force using quantum techniques, it would be extremely expensive. They would probably use it for something like Osama Bin Laden's cell phone audio (or whoever is in the same category these days). They would not waste time on your or my communications, just not interesting enough.

C: Most attacks on secure encrypted communication work out of band, by going after passwords, keys, traffic analysis, and stuff like that.  This already works reasonably well, and will continue to work.  

D: Even today, symmetric encryption is considered safe against quantum attacks (it's just hard to use).  There are also a variety of public-key encryption algorithms already designed that can't be broken by Shor's algorithm running on quantum computers; I don't know how many of those are already implemented.  Quantum computers will not be the end of encryption; it will just mean a complete change in how we encrypt, and a giant hassle.


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## D-FENS (May 30, 2019)

Phishfry said:


> How will we know when common encryption is threatened?


When it gets published on wikileaks.


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2019)

I was really hoping for some enlightening conversation about entanglement.
Where is the skepticism?









						Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit
					

I remember spotting the quantum computing trend when I was  a larval physics nerdling. I figured maybe I could get in on the chuckwagon if my dissertation project didn’t work out in a big way…




					scottlocklin.wordpress.com


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jun 9, 2019)

My view is that on the one side we have FreeBSD, my drill press, and quality cakes. On the other side we have quantum computing, 5G, and Facebook privacy.   (ymmv)


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 9, 2019)

Tell me when the first vi editor is written using quantum computing.
Then I'll come back.


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## Lamia (Jun 9, 2019)

The sheer amount of resources going into crypto-currencies can confirm that we are almost there. How will we know? There would be more warnings on whistle-blower websites.


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2019)

Lamia said:


> The sheer amount of resources going into crypto-currencies can confirm that we are almost there.


This don't make sense? Are you talking about trading in crypto currency or hardware used for generating keys?
If resources are pouring into cryto currencies it would be further proof that quantum computer encryption breaking is not an issue.
Who would invest resources in something that could soon be broken? QC will supposedly break the current crypto currency model.

What worries me is Honeywell. They are old school DOD manufacturer and not bubble buyers. So something may be up here.


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## CraigHB (Jun 9, 2019)

Spooks in the USA seem to be pretty darn good at keeping things secret when they want to.  I'd be surprised if all our internet traffic in the US is not scrutinized through NSA servers.  After all the internet was developed with DARPA funding.  

It takes a lot computing power to sniff everyone's facebook.  Yeah they probably have tech we'll never hear about.


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2019)

They don't sniff social media but there are data aggravators which have the data and there are DOD/NSA contractors who pluck that data. That way there is no direct trail to uncle sam.
They probably leave the scraping to private firms, the analytics to another contractor and the end result gets stored at NSA Bluffdale.




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						Millions of scraped public social net profiles left in open AWS S3 box
					

Poorly configured cloud buckets strike again – this time, LocalBlox fingered




					www.theregister.co.uk
				



Coral Reef is probably just the militarys code name for the output of the project:




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						Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets
					

Dozens of terabytes exposed, your tax dollars at work




					www.theregister.co.uk


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## ralphbsz (Jun 9, 2019)

The headline from The Register is wonderfully idiotic: "Dozens of terabytes exposed".

Sorry, but dozens of terabytes is NOTHING.  That is a few disk drives!  Facebook probably has dozens of exabytes of disk space they use; roughly a factor of a million more.

Getting back to quantum computing: I'm not worried about it breaking encryption anytime soon.  If you are worried about encryption being broken, the real issue is stuff like European governments insisting that they get all the keys used for WhatsApp encryption.  You don't need a quantum computer to listen to encrypted data; all you need is a strong government, suitable laws, and communication companies with weak spines.


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2019)

ralphbsz said:


> Sorry, but dozens of terabytes is NOTHING. That is a few disk drives! Facebook probably has dozens of exabytes of disk space they use; roughly a factor of a million more.


Maybe this was just one 24hour period intake with a wrongly set permissions on the bucket. 363 other buckets up there too.
Truthfully I would expect that the buckets are only used for data in transit.
Both incoming and outgoing giving Bluffdale and the other facilities some isolation.


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## Crivens (Jun 9, 2019)

ralphbsz
Well, EU fasc... sorry, democratically sel... elected officials want to be on par with the US. Who can blame them?


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2019)

I will concede that the Register is not a scientific journal. I like the format and commentary.


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2019)

I found this comment in the above blog to be quite thought provoking.


> The “QC” racket is not merely a “string theory”-style grant-eater feeding trough; it is also a key component of NSA’s two-decade FUD campaign against the use of actually-strong crypto by the public (RSA, Cramer-Shoup, and variants) and in favour of questionable replacements (“elliptic curve” algos.)


From the blog author:


> If there were real QCs, elliptic curves also submit to QC attacks; it’s basically the same thing as factoring.


Another poster


> But it is also an (apparently quite effective) disinformation sleight of hand trick: successfully scared quite a few gullible people/organizations out of the use of effective (4096+-bit RSA) public key crypto, and into the use of e.g. 256-bit ECDSA, via fraudulent proofs of “equivalent strength”, “QC resistance”, etc.


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## ralphbsz (Jun 9, 2019)

That's old news.  Government agencies all over the world have been (a) trying to steer non-government users towards using breakable crypto, (b) trying to prohibit the use of unbreakable crypto, or at least make sure the crypto keys are always available to the government, culminating in (c) mandatory key escrow, the most egregious example of it was the clipper chip and Dorothy Denning, and (d) building specialized computers to break weak crypto.


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## CraigHB (Jun 10, 2019)

Can't speak for other countries, but in the US our system is really good at creating illusions propagated by bureaucracies given power to operate above the constitution.  Among them is privacy.  If there are methods to break what we think is strong encryption we certainly will not hear about them.  They can and will keep them secret.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 10, 2019)

CraigHB said:


> Among them is privacy. If there are methods to break what we think is strong encryption we certainly will not hear about them. They can and will keep them secret.


The other side of the coin in that is, if policing agencies have access to encrypted data, then bad guys can't hide behind it. Policing agencies, in countries with the knowledge how to do such things, are looking for bad guys and not for me in any other way so I'm OK with that.

I do not want this to degrade into political commentary.


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## CraigHB (Jun 10, 2019)

No matter how flat you make an issue there's always two sides.

Yeah it's great for people fighting crime to have access to all this personal data, actually amazing how fast they can find and catch villains these days.  Often it's simply through social media out there in the clear.  Good thing criminals are so stupid.  On the other hand that means information we want to keep private (like medical history) is out there for anyone with a moniker of authority to examine.

One thing I personally experienced recently, I went to get an auto insurance quote online and they pretty much filled out the entire form for me once they had some personal data.  I was shocked by the level of my personal information out there for any ol' server to grab when it wants.  The walls are definitely closing in.


drhowarddrfine said:


> I do not want this to degrade into political commentary.


Haha, I'm done now.


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## ralphbsz (Jun 10, 2019)

CraigHB said:


> If there are methods to break what we think is strong encryption we certainly will not hear about them.  They can and will keep them secret.


I doubt that.  While the random person on the street does not know what the TLA (three letter agencies) are doing, there are lots of people outside of the classified bubble who know the technical capabilities of the TLAs.  That's because the TLAs buy hardware, software, and services on the open market, and that open market is full of people who talk, and who can legally talk.  You can even see details in press releases.  For example, you can see press releases that company X just sold a supercomputer to government agency A: from that you can figure out that company X is a provider of such machines.  Then you go to the stock market, and look up that company X's total revenue is $n billion per year, and its only competitors are companies Y and Z.  You look up the revenue of companies Y and Z, and you immediately have an upper limit on the amount that the TLAs can spend on products from this market.  Then you use some simple scaling laws: For one MIPS you need to spend so-and-so-many $, therefore the TLAs can have at most this many MIPS, and with that they can break the following codes.


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## CraigHB (Jun 11, 2019)

Haha, that's like the conversations I have with my wife, she's a total conspiracy theorist and I'm always trying to debunk the claims she reiterates.  She rubs off on me a bit.  But we're just the mushrooms (fed crap and kept in the dark) so who knows how deep the rabbit hole really goes.


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