Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
So far the biggest achievement in quantum computing seems to either be making a super random number reasonably quickly, or figuring out what quantum computers might be good for some day. So breaking encryption seems like a big leap.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Honestly, the random number generation on quantum computers is practically useless. Speeds will not get anywhere near as close to a pseudorandom number generator, and there are very simple ones you can implement that are blazing fast, far faster than any quantum computer will spit out, and produce numbers that are widely considered in the industry to be cryptographically secure. You can use AES for example as a PRNG and most modern CPUs like x86 processor have hardware-level AES implementation. This is why modern computers allow you to encrypt your drive, because you can have like a file that is a terabyte big that is encrypted but your CPU can decrypt it as fast as it takes for the window to pop up after you double-click it.
While PRNG does require an entropy pool, the entropy pool does not need to be large, you can spit out terabytes of cryptographically secure pseudorandom numbers on a fraction of a kilobyte of entropy data, and again, most modern CPUs actually include instructions to grab this entropy data, such as Intel’s CPUs have an RDSEED instruction which let you grab thermal noise from the CPU. In order to avoid someone discovering a potential exploit, most modern OSes will mix into this pool other sources as well, like fluctuations in fan voltage.
Indeed, used to with Linux, you had a separate way to read random numbers directly from the entropy pool and another way to read pseudorandom numbers, those being /dev/random and /dev/urandom. If you read from the entropy pool, if it ran out, the program would freeze until it could collect more, so some old Linux programs you would see the program freeze until you did things like move your mouse around.
But you don’t see this anymore because generating enormous amounts of cryptograpphysically secure random nubmers is so easy with modern algorithms that modern Linux just collects a little bit of entropy at boot and it uses that to generate all pseudorandom numbers after, and just got rid of needing to read it directly, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom now just internally in the OS have the same behavior. Any time your PC needs a random number it just pulls from the pseudorandom number generator that was configured at boot, and you have just from the short window of collecting entropy data at boot the ability to generate sufficient pseudorandom numbers basically forever, and these are the numbers used for any cryptographic application you may choose to run.
The point of all this is to just say random number generation is genuinely a solved problem, people don’t get just how easy it is to basically produce practically infinite cryptographically secure pseudorandom numbers. While on paper quantum computers are “more secure” because their random numbers would be truly random, in practice you literally would never notice a difference. If you gave two PhD mathematicians or statisticians the same message, one encrypted using a quantum random number generator and one encrypted with a PRNG like AES or ChaCha20, and asked them to decipher them, they would not be able to decipher either. In fact, I doubt they would even be able to identify which one was even encoded using the quantum random number generator. A string of random numbers looks just as “random” to any random number test suite whether or not it came from a QRNG or a high-quality PRNG (usually called CSPRNG).