Is the Internet Safe from Quantum Computers? 🔐

We discuss the basic building blocks of internet security, and the important role that asymmetric cryptography plays. We make an analogy to colored paint and describe the modular arithmetic underlying many cryptography schemes.

Unfortunately, although quantum computers are not powerful enough to break our cryptographic algorithms yet, they soon will be. The race is on to develop quantum-resistant algorithms, and NIST has one algorithm in the final stages of being standardized, likely available in 2024. We try to give an intuition for how ML-KEM will work.

NIST to Standardize Encryption Algorithms That Can Resist Attack by Quantum Computers
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2023/08/nist-standardize-encryption-algorithms-can-resist-attack-quantum-computers

Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard [draft]
https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/fips/203/ipd

Which elliptic curves are quantum resistant?
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/35482/which-elliptic-curves-are-quantum-resistant

Classical and Quantum Algorithms for Isogeny-based Cryptography [thesis]
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/9756/Sankar_Anirudh.pdf?sequence=3

#quantum #cryptography #ai

0:00 Intro
0:21 Contents
0:27 Part 1: Internet security
1:07 Why quantum computers break cryptography
1:47 Recordings can be broken in future
2:04 Quantum entanglement
2:43 How much time do we have?
3:15 Quantum computers aren't magical
3:44 Part 2: Classical cryptography
4:05 Primitive 1: Digital signatures
4:22 Example: SHA1 hash broken
5:16 Example: first public collision of SHA1
6:07 Comparison with quantum computers
6:25 Primitive 2: Symmetric cryptography
6:58 Primitive 3: Asymmetric cryptography
7:47 How to build secure connections
8:39 Hardness of mathematical problem
8:55 Example: key exchange through paint
10:26 Technical example: modular arithmetic
11:41 Part 3: Post-quantum cryptography
12:16 Asymmetric cryptography weak to quantum
12:41 Remaking asymmetric cryptography
13:01 New hard problems
13:42 NIST competition for post quantum crypto
14:11 New lattice-based algorithm ML-KEM
15:37 Timeline for ML-KEM
16:17 At least one more algorithm needed
16:50 Conclusion
17:45 Outro