New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.
Why do we keep caring about signal when there’s Matrix?
Because my grandpa can work with signal which is still encrypted communication. Thus its a low threshhold to adoption and significant increase in cyber hygiene. Even for his type of audience.
Because Signal works and Matrix doesn’t.
Because Matrix barely works half the time and has some significant security/privacy flaws still. One of which is: if there’s a bug that makes it possible for someone to snoop your metadata and the fix requires a server update… You’re SOL if the people you’re talking to don’t get the update.
It took me years of begging and pleading with my wife to start using signal, the setup for which is way easier than matrix. I don’t think I’d be able to get my wife to use matrix due to the increased complexity.
I have secure comms with my wife (albeit centralized) and that’s what’s important to me.
Having in mind we are not even close to breaking classical cryptography with quantum computing I doubt this was their best investment of time
the best time was yesterday. the next best time is today. securing systems after they’re broken, when data could actively be collected prior to the breakthrough, is not the way to approach security.
There are nation states just straight up intercepting and storing signal data on their networks in hopes that it can be decrypted in the future. 20 year old messages will still be useful.
Once quantum computers break classical cryptography, it’s going to be too late to develop post-quantum cryptography, mate.
The best time to develop resilience is right now.
It’s not going to happen this century, probably never
Even if quantum computing turns out to actually be infeasible and classical cryptography is secure for the next millennia, it’s still a good feature to have a third independent encryption layer in the protocol. It makes it that much less likely reliant on the other two being bulletproof.
Maybe. I don’t know at which point all that extra processing stops being worth it.
How sure are you? Assign a percentage chance to it and the cost of exposing old messages, and compare that to the cost of this dev effort.
We know governments are using it, and there’s likely a lot of sensitive data transmitted through Signal, so the cost of it happening in the next 20 years would still be substantial, so even if the chance of that timeline happening is small, there’s still value in investing in forward secrecy.
They also want nuclear fusion reactors and there is none in the horizon after 50 years of research and development (even though many want to sell the idea that there are).
You can start preparing for post hypercomputation cryptography too if you believe your argument.
I doubt that the first ones to break it will be eager to communicate their findings to the public.
This tech is far to valuable for military/spionage goals. For all we know it already exists.
There’s hardly ever glory in prevention…
Lol, it shows the hype quantum computing has sold and how detached the public thought is about it from reality.
I’m friends with two quantum computing researchers and they are pretty sure quantum computing will never be a practical application because of how the noise and errors scale with the system size.
The quantum computing hype is really annoying but we don’t know the future. One day there might be a breakthrough in noise reduction. I’d rather signal have post-quantum cryptography and not need it than get blindsided if there is suddenly a qc that can break rsa with shor. Not to mention intelligence agencies doing store now/decrypt later stuff.
