Bullrun - All Your Encryption Are Belong To Us

[_poto_]

What D-Wave is doing is friggin awesome and all, but the 512 qubit systems aren't an end all solution. It's probably going to be 3-4 years before they have a 8-10k qubit system that can brute force everything in real time.

In tests last September, an independent researcher found that for some types of problems the Dwave quantum computer was 3,600 times faster than a traditional intel quadcore workstation (2.4 Ghz quadcore chips with 16 GB of memory and about 420 GFlops). According to a D-Wave official, the machine performed even better in Google’s tests, which involved 500 variables with different constraints. “The tougher, more complex ones had better performance,” said Colin Williams, D-Wave’s director of business development. “For most problems, it was 11,000 times faster, but in the more difficult 50 percent, it was 33,000 times faster. In the top 25 percent, it was 50,000 times faster.

So for 25% of Google's optimization problems the Dwave system was roughly 50,000 times better than a 420 Gflop system. This approximately is 21 petaflops.

from:
Dwave 512 qubit quantum computer faster than any supercomputer for optimization problems of interest to Google with about 21 petaflop equivalent

 

[jryan21]

Yeah, quantum computers are not magic.

For perspective, the supercomputer at ORNL can do 20 petaflops. The cost for power consumption is in the ballpark of $1 million per year per petaflop.

I don't see them being able to brute-force everything in real time, even in 5 years. I could see them solving a bounded case in a matter of minutes, and maybe a general case in several months, but that doesn't mean shit if they can't scale it.

 

[dchuk]

Yeah, quantum computers are not magic.

For perspective, the supercomputer at ORNL can do 20 petaflops. The cost for power consumption is in the ballpark of $1 million per year per petaflop.

I don't see them being able to brute-force everything in real time, even in 5 years. I could see them solving a bounded case in a matter of minutes, and maybe a general case in several months, but that doesn't mean shit if they can't scale it.

Fucking thank you. It's like no one here actually understands the implications of real time brute force decryption. Without a backdoor in these algos it's all just random data until they can decrypt it.

 

[dchuk]

Do you realize that with each new revelation about government abuse of power over the years, that you (and not just you, lots of people) just keep moving the goal posts further away? It's almost as if the default assumption is that the government can't be wrong therefore we must modify the truth in a way that makes sense of the new information. You see the same mental gymnastics with religious people too. It's weird.

I'm not denying the government is doing nefarious things here, obviously they are.

I'm just saying that the way people are saying they're doing it is so god damn wrong and indicative of absolute ignorance of the technologies being discussed. There's a massive difference between real time brute force decryption and using a previously implemented backdoor weakness in the encryption algorithms.

It's exactly the same scenario as repelling into a bank and cracking a safe while hanging from the ceiling avoiding the laser motion sensors and scrambling the CCTV video feed to obfuscate the security tape...or just stealing the janitor's key ring and a uniform and walking right in and taking it. One is fantasy, the other is just sneaky and much more practical.

 

[Unarmed Gunman]

I'm not denying the government is doing nefarious things here, obviously they are.

I'm just saying that the way people are saying they're doing it is so god damn wrong and indicative of absolute ignorance of the technologies being discussed. There's a massive difference between real time brute force decryption and using a previously implemented backdoor weakness in the encryption algorithms.

It's exactly the same scenario as repelling into a bank and cracking a safe while hanging from the ceiling avoiding the laser motion sensors and scrambling the CCTV video feed to obfuscate the security tape...or just stealing the janitor's key ring and a uniform and walking right in and taking it. One is fantasy, the other is just sneaky and much more practical.

I'm just saying, last year if someone said the NSA was spying on all US citizens and they were doing so with the help of backroom deals with the major tech companies in this country you would be laughed at and handed a tin foil hat.

Now instead of arguing about IF they're doing it we're arguing over HOW they're doing it. At what point does the public stop arguing with each other and start to root cause the actual problem?

And anyone that thinks the solution is more or better encryption - you're doing it wrong.

 

[dchuk]

I'm just saying, last year if someone said the NSA was spying on all US citizens and they were doing so with the help of backroom deals with the major tech companies in this country you would be laughed at and handed a tin foil hat.

Now instead of arguing about IF they're doing it we're arguing over HOW they're doing it. At what point does the public stop arguing with each other and start to root cause the actual problem?

And anyone that thinks the solution is more or better encryption - you're doing it wrong.

Properly understanding the technique the government is using is the difference between facing a sneaky, conniving grifter or an all powerful, massively more technologically advanced than everyone else super genius. It really changes the context and the way you should approach fighting back.

 

[Unarmed Gunman]

Properly understanding the technique the government is using is the difference between facing a sneaky, conniving grifter or an all powerful, massively more technologically advanced than everyone else super genius. It really changes the context and the way you should approach fighting back.

If we know anything for certain, it's that the public knows very little about the full capabilities of the US Government.

 

[20figures]

Properly understanding the technique the government is using is the difference between facing a sneaky, conniving grifter or an all powerful, massively more technologically advanced than everyone else super genius. It really changes the context and the way you should approach fighting back.

I think what he's saying is instead of treating the symptom lets treat the cause.

End the NSA or create an open and very public oversight commitee. I'm sure that will never happen though because "national security", or something about our children.