From: frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell)
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 94 05:41:13 PDT
To: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: Anyone seen the 'quantum cryptanalysis' thread?
Message-ID: <199409291241.AA11195@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 12:11 PM 9/28/94 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

>Alice switches to 15,000-bit moduli....the how much longer does it
>take the Shor machine to do its thing? (Even if polynomial, what
>factor?)
>
>I won't speculate further. The numbers are indeterminate, even to
>Shor, I suspect.
>
>In any case, nothing for Cypherpunks to worry about in our lifetimes
>(certainly not in my lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of our
>youngest members).

It's easier to make an omlette out of eggs than to make eggs out of an
omlette so encryption should remain well ahead of decryption.

This differs from the popular view that decryption would eventually win the
"war" with the encryption and devise a way of defeating *any* possible
code/cipher.  This "fact" was expressed in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars
stories where he said that the Martians didn't use codes much because they
were vulnerable.  See also Sneakers in which we have a "black box" decyption
device that can break any code.  Also the guy who confronted me at the
London conference last year and said "they broke the satellite movie coding
system so why can't they break PGP?"

I wonder where this idea comes from.

DCF

"Who was shocked, shocked by the end title sequence in Sneakers which
features a newsreader describing how good commie liberals like the Robert
Redford and Dan Ackroyd characters are using their decoding device to steal
money from the Republican National Committee and transfer it to Greenpeace
and all the usual suspects.  Looks like those guys don't believe in
democracy.  That sort of thing is worse than the Watergate break in."