It will be interesting to compare PQ rollout to HTTPS rollout historically (either the "SSL becomes widespread in 2015" thing, or the deprecation SSL 3.0). Cloudflare is in an easy position to do stuff like this because it can decouple end user/browser upgrade cycles from backend upgrade cycles.
Some browsers and some end user devices get upgraded quickly, so making it easy to make it optionally-PQ on any site, and then as that rollout extends, some specialty sites can make it mandatory, and then browser/device UX can do soft warnings to users (or other activity like downranking), and then at some point something like STS Strict can be exposed, and then largely become a default (and maybe just remove the non-PQ algorithms entirely from many sites).
I definitely was on team "the risks of a rushed upgrade might outweigh the risks of actual quantum breaks" until pretty recently -- rushing to upgrade has lots of problems always and is a great way to introduce new bugs, but based on the latest information, the balance seems to have shifted to doing an upgrade quickly.
Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).
Waiting now means rushing even more close to the deadline! We added stats on origin support for post-quantum encryption. Not as much support as browsers of course, but better than I expected. Still a long road (and authentication!). https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum
> Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).
Cloudflare pushing PQ by default is probably the single most impactful thing that can happen for adotpion. Most developers will never voluntarily migrate their TLS config. Making it the default at the CDN layer means millions of sites get upgraded without anyone making a decision
The big change here is that we're going to roll out PQ authentication as well.
One important decision was to make this "included at no extra cost" with every plan. The last thing the Internet needs is blood-sucking parasites charging extra for this.
It's theory. The concern is for avoiding a (likely, IMO) scenario where the only real indication that someone cracked QC is one or more teams of researchers in the field going dark because they got pulled into some tight-lipped NSA project. If we wait until we have an unambiguous path to QC, it might well be too late.
To avoid the scenario where for a prolonged period of time the intelligence community has secret access to QC, researchers against that type of thing are incentivized to shout fire when they see the glimmerings of a possibly productive path of research.
cloudflare making pq the default is the only way we get real adoption. most devs are never going to mess with their tls settings unless they absolutely have to. having it happen at the cdn level is the perfect silent upgrade for millions of sites without the owners needing to do anything
Quantum computing, and the generic term 'quantum' is gearing up to be the next speculative investment hype bubble after AI, so prepare for a lot of these kinds of articles
nah. governments around the world are hoovering up traffic today with the hope of a "cheap" (by nation state standards) quantum computer. Some of the secrets sent today are "evergreen" (i.e are still relevant 10+ years into the future), amongst a whole lot of cruft. There is massive incentive to hide the technology to keep your peers transmitting in vulnerable encryption as long as possible.
For sure, that or just ensuring they have laws in place that grant them access to the unencrypted data we are sending to CDNs operating in their jurisdiction (when necessary for national security reasons).
The secrecy around this is precisely the opposite of what we saw in the 90s when it started to become clear DES needed to go. Yet another sign that the global powers are preparing for war.
What do you mean? For as long as I remember (back to late 1994) people understood DES to be inadequate; we used DES-EDE and IDEA (and later RC4) instead. What "secrecy" would there have been? The feasibility of breaking DES given a plausible budget goes all the way back to the late 1970s. The first prize given for demonstrating a DES break was only $10,000.
Triple-key DES (DES-EDE) had already been proposed by IBM in 1979, in response to the criticism that the 56-bit keys of DES are far too short.
So practically immediately after DES was standardized, people realized that NSA had crippled it by limiting the key length to 56 bits, and they started to use workarounds.
Before introducing RC2 and RC4 in 1987, Ronald Rivest had used since 1984 another method of extending the key length of DES, named DESX, which was cheaper than DES-EDE as it used a single block cipher function invocation. However, like also RC4, DESX was kept as a RSA trade secret, until it was leaked, also like RC4, during the mid nineties.
IDEA (1992, after a preliminary version was published in 1991) was the first block cipher function that was more secure than DES and which was also publicly described.
My read of the recent google blog post is that they framed it as cryptocurrency related stuff just so they don't say the silent thing out loud. But lots of people "in the know" / working on this are taking it much more seriously than just cryptobros go broke. So my hunch is that there's more to it and they didn't want to say it / couldn't / weren't allowed to.
It should be noted that quantum computers are a threat mainly for interactions between unrelated parties which perform legal activities, e.g. online shopping, online banking, notarized legal documents that use long-term digital signatures.
Quantum computers are not a threat for spies or for communications within private organizations where security is considered very important, where the use of public-key cryptography can easily be completely avoided and authentication and session key exchanges can be handled with pre-shared secret keys used only for that purpose.
Most likely the NSA or someone else is ahead of the game and already has a quantum computer. If the tech news rumors are to true the NSA has a facility in Utah that can gather large swaths of the internet and process the data.
Some browsers and some end user devices get upgraded quickly, so making it easy to make it optionally-PQ on any site, and then as that rollout extends, some specialty sites can make it mandatory, and then browser/device UX can do soft warnings to users (or other activity like downranking), and then at some point something like STS Strict can be exposed, and then largely become a default (and maybe just remove the non-PQ algorithms entirely from many sites).
I definitely was on team "the risks of a rushed upgrade might outweigh the risks of actual quantum breaks" until pretty recently -- rushing to upgrade has lots of problems always and is a great way to introduce new bugs, but based on the latest information, the balance seems to have shifted to doing an upgrade quickly.
Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).
IPv6 deserves a prominent spot there
The big change here is that we're going to roll out PQ authentication as well.
One important decision was to make this "included at no extra cost" with every plan. The last thing the Internet needs is blood-sucking parasites charging extra for this.
Which one do you think is PQ-secure?
https://qi.rt.ht/?pq={api.,}{stripe,paypal}.com
To avoid the scenario where for a prolonged period of time the intelligence community has secret access to QC, researchers against that type of thing are incentivized to shout fire when they see the glimmerings of a possibly productive path of research.
So practically immediately after DES was standardized, people realized that NSA had crippled it by limiting the key length to 56 bits, and they started to use workarounds.
Before introducing RC2 and RC4 in 1987, Ronald Rivest had used since 1984 another method of extending the key length of DES, named DESX, which was cheaper than DES-EDE as it used a single block cipher function invocation. However, like also RC4, DESX was kept as a RSA trade secret, until it was leaked, also like RC4, during the mid nineties.
IDEA (1992, after a preliminary version was published in 1991) was the first block cipher function that was more secure than DES and which was also publicly described.
Quantum computers are not a threat for spies or for communications within private organizations where security is considered very important, where the use of public-key cryptography can easily be completely avoided and authentication and session key exchanges can be handled with pre-shared secret keys used only for that purpose.
Most likely the NSA or someone else is ahead of the game and already has a quantum computer. If the tech news rumors are to true the NSA has a facility in Utah that can gather large swaths of the internet and process the data.