Dwave has a 1000 qubit quantum computer now in their lab and will release in later in 2014. Since D-Wave's architecture has not yet been able to run Shor's Algorithm and its processor is of the type quantum annealing processor which is not a general quantum computer, I wouldn't hold my breath! OTOH, if it can be shown to run Shor's Algorithm, then all bets are off as Google, NASA and Lockheed Martin are all collaborating with D-Wave to get there. -- Tom
It sucks that basically all asymmetric crypto that's been collected is about to be destroyed. There really needs to be a push for PFS.
Do you reckon they're keeping logs of old crypto sessions around just to crack it afterwards? Was there evidence of that I missed someplace?
Hasn't it already been confirmed by the leaks? I could swear there was at least one thing that discussed this, but I don't follow it all that closely. I honestly just assume that our sessions aren't just being intercepted but also stored.
True; link I read somewhere else, encrypted data was kept for some 15 years but can't find that source atm.
I thought that was only metadata. I also thought the the NSA is already struggling to cope with the extreme amount of metadata they are trying to store, never mind storing the actual encrypted data which would be even larger than non-encrypted data. I mean, I could be totally wrong but, to me it seems pointless to store so much in the hope you can one day decrypt it and then what. Say "Oh look we could have prevented XYZ if we had the technology at the time"? :s From one perspective you could say that if we are really close to quantum computing, it would start making sense to start storing it now. But then again, websites have already started deploying forward secrecy, would it have made sense to store that data years ago when quantum computing wasn't in sight but forward secrecy wasn't deployed? It's probably more likely that they are storing data from already suspected people. A good debate I guess but I doubt we'll see an answer.
So their QC isn't actually faster in any meaningful way when it comes to NP problems than a classical computer, just by the way. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643 @FD, Using encryption makes you a suspected person in their eyes, I believe. Storing is no issue though, they have the room, and the computing power. In a stored format / tree they'd be able to access the data quickly too. PFS isn't really used anywhere, unfortunately. Google and a few other sites, yeah. And TOR. But otherwise no. I don't think they store every single packet that goes through their system but I would assume they store quite a lot.
Dwave Supercomputing Quantum Computer passes more rigorous tests that confirm Quantumness of the System. -- Tom
