Comment by Intermernet
9 days ago
While I understand what you're saying, you can extend this logic to such things as faster-than-light travel, over-unity devices, time travel etc. They're just "hard" math problems.
The current state of encryption is based on math problems many levels harder than the ones that existed a few decades ago. Most vulnerabilities have been due to implementation bugs, and not actual math bugs. Probably the highest profile "actual math" bug is the DUAL_EC_DRBG weakness which was (almost certainly) deliberately inserted by the NSA, and triggered a wave of distrust in not just NIST, but any committee designed encryption standards. This is why people prefer to trust DJB than NIST.
There are enough qualified eyes on most modern open encryption standards that I'd trust them to be as strong as any other assumptions we base huge infrastructure on. Tensile strengths of materials, force of gravity, resistance and heat output of conductive materials, etc, etc.
The material risk to South Korea was almost certainly orders of magnitude greater by not having encrypted backups, than by having encrypted backups, no matter where they were stored (as long as they weren't in the same physical location, obviously).
>While I understand what you're saying, you can extend this logic to such things as faster-than-light travel, over-unity devices, time travel etc. They're just "hard" math problems.
No you can't. Those aren't hard math problems. They're Universe breaking assertions.
This is not the problem of flight. They're not engineering problems. They're not, "perhaps in the future, we'll figure out..".
Unless our understanding of physics is completely wrong, then None of those things are ever going to happen.
According to our understanding of physics, which is based on our understanding of maths, the time taken to brute force a modern encryption standard, even with quantum computers, is longer than the expected life of the universe. The likely-hood of "finding a shortcut" to do this is in the same ball-park as "finding a shortcut" to tap into ZPE or "vacuum energy" or create worm-holes. The maths is understood, and no future theoretical advances can change that. It would involve completely new maths to break these. We passed the "if only computers were a few orders of magnitude faster it's feasible" a decade or more ago.
Sorry, I don't think this is true. There is basically no useful proven lower bound on the complexity of breaking popular cryptosystems. The math is absolutely not understood. In fact, it is one of the most poorly understood areas of mathematics. Consider that breaking any classical cryptosystem is in the complexity class NP, since if an oracle gives you the decryption key, you can break it quickly. Well we can't even prove that NP != P, i.e., that there even exists a problem where having such an oracle gives you a real advantage. Actually, we can't even prove that PSPACE != P, which should be way easier than proving NP != P if it's true.