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The Rational Fear of the Quantum Crypto-Apocalypse
Cryptography Post #6156 · source on Telegram

The Rational Fear of the Quantum Crypto-Apocalypse

Description

A three-panel meme using scenes from the movie 'Finding Neverland' to express anxiety about quantum computing. In the first panel, a man (Johnny Depp) tells a young boy, "LET US IMAGINE THAT TODAY QUANTUM COMPUTERS EXIST WITH 'GOOD' CAPACITY TO BREAK CRYPTOGRAPHY." In the second panel, the man's face is shown in a concerned close-up, with the text, "THERE REALLY IS NO REASON TO WORRY ABOUT QUANTUM COMPUTERS BREAKING EVERYTHING." The final panel shows the man comforting the crying boy on a park bench, admitting, "BUT I'M SCARED...". This meme humorously captures the cognitive dissonance felt by many in the tech industry. While rationally acknowledging the development and rollout of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standards, like those recently announced by NIST, the existential threat that quantum computers pose to current encryption standards (RSA, ECC) is a source of deep-seated anxiety. The meme personifies the internal struggle between the calm, professional understanding of the problem and the overwhelming fear of a potential 'crypto-apocalypse' and the monumental migration effort required to prevent it

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Cryptography QuantumComputing Security IndustryTrends Hype MentalHealth

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QuantumComputing Encryption Security QuantumComputingConcepts

Comments

22
Anonymous ★ Top Pick We're all calm about the quantum threat until we remember the multi-year global effort it took just to get people to stop using TLS 1.0. Now, do that for every cryptographic primitive on the planet
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    We're all calm about the quantum threat until we remember the multi-year global effort it took just to get people to stop using TLS 1.0. Now, do that for every cryptographic primitive on the planet

  2. Anonymous

    Shor’s algorithm cracking RSA is theoretical; convincing the CFO we need new HSMs because ML-KEM keys don’t fit in the 2009 firmware - that’s the quantum threat keeping me up tonight

  3. Anonymous

    The real quantum entanglement is between our current PKI infrastructure and the sunk cost fallacy - we know migration to post-quantum algorithms will be painful, but we're superpositioned between 'it's too early' and 'it's too late' until the first RSA-2048 key collapses

  4. Anonymous

    The real quantum superposition is security engineers simultaneously believing 'quantum computers are decades away' and 'we need to migrate all our cryptographic infrastructure yesterday' - because nothing says 'I understand threat modeling' quite like losing sleep over Shor's algorithm while your production systems still accept MD5 certificates

  5. Anonymous

    Shor ruining RSA isn’t the scary part; it’s rotating every mTLS cert across 300 services while the HSM vendor calls PQC “Q4 roadmap.”

  6. Anonymous

    Quantum breaking RSA doesn’t scare me; turning on Kyber in TLS and watching MTU‑fragmented handshakes bounce off our 2013 load balancer does

  7. Anonymous

    Quantum threats to PKI: the one migration where 'zero-downtime' means accepting your certs are already superpositioned

  8. @Sp1cyP3pp3r 2y

    but can quantum computers run minecraft?

    1. @pulsar_sp 2y

      you should've said," but can they run at least anything except 7*3 == 21 at the moment?..")

      1. dev_meme 2y

        Yes, even publicly anounced one can do more than that for quite some time already

      2. dev_meme 2y

        I mean, 15 was in the begging of the century and 21 was in 2012?

        1. @pulsar_sp 2y

          yeah, my bad. what were the last numbers exactly?

      3. dev_meme 2y

        Probablt the best example would be IBM’s Eagle machine learning (but at least it was fair demonstration of tech)

    2. @SamsonovAnton 2y

      They certainly ⟨can|cannot⟩!

  9. dev_meme 2y

    ML-KEM (Kyber) - https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.203.pdf ML-DSA (Dilithium) - https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.204.pdf SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) - https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.205.pdf At the very end of each document there is short appendix section that outlines the changes from the "ipd" draft versions published last summer.

  10. @NickNirus 2y

    implement them now please

  11. @CcxCZ 2y

    Just use hybrid, like tinyssh/OpenSSH does.

  12. @anatoli26 2y

    At this moment probably for the general public post-quantum is not needed, but stuff like blockchains and some things that could still require privacy or provable authenticity even decades after, may really need post-quantum algos today

    1. @L2CacheGay 2y

      the point of post quantum is less about the threat of quantum computing directly and more about finding problems that are resistant to an easy solution to the discrete log problem being found

  13. @dsmagikswsa 2y

    Any TLDR? How post quantum encryption actually work?

  14. @SoutHora 2y

    Me, who came here to ask what's the name of the movie. So what's it?

    1. @Algoinde 2y

      Finding Neverland

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