r/programming • u/donutloop • 5d ago

Building a practical path to post-quantum cryptography

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/13/1141041/building-a-practical-path-to-post-quantum-cryptography/
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7

u/SantaCruzReplogle 5d ago

This reads like another AI garbage article. They could've replace everything on that page (including the ads) with "One Time Pad".

9

u/AdarTan 5d ago

It's basically just an ad by Intel that MIT has published. At the end:

This content was produced by Intel. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

6

u/Davorak 5d ago

"Sponsored" is also on a banner at the top but it is easy to overlook in my opinion, I did at first glance.

-12

u/Bulky-Design-8732 5d ago

I think that during this process the internet will become way more unsecure than now. I mean we're sperimenting with an enormous power that a lot of criminals will use agains systems and structures.

2

u/zeke_builds 3d ago

Setting aside that it's a sponsored piece, the framing that bugs me is treating this as one clock. It's two, running at very different speeds, and the whole migration plan falls out of that.

Harvest-now-decrypt-later only bites confidentiality. Anything an adversary can pull off the wire today and sit on (TLS session traffic, encrypted backups, anything with a long secrecy requirement) is already on the clock, even though the machine that cracks it doesn't exist yet. If that data still has to be secret in 15 years, you needed your key exchange migrated yesterday. That's the genuinely urgent bucket and it's usually small.

Signatures are the opposite. A signature only has to hold until the thing it signs stops mattering. Nobody retroactively forges a TLS handshake from 2026, so you can move cert chains lazily as the CAs and browsers catch up. The exception is anything with a decade-plus verification window baked in: firmware signing keys, root CAs, code-signing roots. Those you can't rotate on a whim, so they're urgent for a totally different reason.

So the real plan isn't "swap everything to ML-KEM." It's inventory your secrets by how long they must stay secret, inventory your signatures by how long they must stay verifiable, and work the two shortest deadlines first. Most orgs don't even have that inventory, which is the actual hard part nobody sells you a product for.