Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

If any kind of proof about serious quantum computers comes to light, browsers can force most websites' hand by marking non-PQ ciphers as insecure.

Maybe it'll require TLS 1.4/QUIC 2, with no changes but the cipher specifications, but it can happen in two or three years. Certificates themselves don't last longer than a year anyway. Corporations running ancient software that doesn't support PQ TLS will have the same configuration options to ignore the security warnings already present for TLS 1.0/plain HTTP connections.

The biggest problem I can imagine is devices talking to the internet no longer receiving firmware updates. If the web host switches protocols, the old clients will start dying off en masses.

View on HN

No need for a TLS 1.4.

Leaf certificates don't last long, but root CAs do. An attacker can just mint new certs from a broken root key.

Hopefully many devices can be upgraded to PQ security with a firmware update. Worse than not receiving updates, is receiving malicious firmware updates, which you can't really prevent without upgrading to something safe first.

> An attacker can just mint new certs from a broken root key.

In Chrome at the very least, the certificate not being in the certificate transparency logs should throw errors and report issues to the mothership, and that should detect abuse almost instantly.

You'd still be DoSing an entire certificate authority because a factored CA private key means the entire key is instantly useless, but it wouldn't allow attacks to last long.

Yeah, PQ certificate transparency is crucial for downgrade protection: https://westerbaan.name/~bas/rwpqc2026/bas.pdf

When you connect, you specify supported ciphers. If the server doesn't support them, there's standard "insufficient security" (71) error that was there since at least TLS 1.0, maybe earlier.

Confidentiality of the TLS connection is indeed easy to handle here.

The hard part is certificate authentication. And that's not included in the cipher suite setting.

There is no reason to not support non quantum safe algorithms for foreseeable future in the first place

You did not increase comprehension by not using a single negative.

They are slower, larger, and less tested. Specifically the hope was to develop hybrids that could also provably be more pre-quantum secure then what they are replacing. History dose not favour rushing cryptography.

You misread the comment you replied to.

Which, to be fair, is easy to do because they used a triple-negative.

Rephrased, they meant to say "there is no reason to remove support for quantum-vulnerable algorithms in the near future."

IMO that's much less likely to be accidentally misinterpreted.

They are large, but they're not that slow actually. We've been testing them for almost a decade now. I agree that rushing is bad. That's why we need to start moving now, so that we're not rushing even closer to the deadline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com