Bruce Schneier: Building Cryptographic Systems

Security guru Bruce Schneier talks with Charles Severance about security from the perspectives of both the National Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. From Computer's April 2016 issue: www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/2016/04/index.html. Subscribe to the Computing Conversations podcast on iTunes at itunes.apple.c....

[@koga7349]

With faster computers (quantum) won't Brute Force attacks win out with standard algorithms (AES). It seems like if a government wants to crack encryption they can with an extremely fast computer. On the flip side if everyone starts rolling their own algorithms they may not be as sound as AES, but a new algorithm will require research and time to break. In this sense it seems like it would take a government longer to break a home-rolled algorithm than a known one like AES considering they probably already have tooling and hardware for AES.

[@Slickjitz]

Allow me to answer this the best of my ability from reading quite a few books on both cryptography and quantum computing. To make this as short as possible QC are still a ways aware from effectively cracking today’s encryptions. Even if they begin becoming more stable “simply” increasing key sizes of standard encryptions like AES from 256 to 512 will ensure secure encryption for probably 10 years if done today. Using Shor’s algorithm to break these encryptions require (n*2) + 1 qubits where n is the length of the key. No QC has gotten to even 100 stable qubits as of today. Even when we get to that point quantum encryption will become the standard and as we speak NIST is working hard to standardize the next quantum encryption standard that everyone will use some day.

[@ahmedeliwa1682]

I really love schnier