• Ephera
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    6 months ago

    Decent video, except for the rant on post-quantum cryptography. That is a real thing and a real concern. Zoom did not come up with it.

    Basically, traditional cryptography gets a lot of mileage out of the principle that multiplying two primes is easy, for example 13*17=221, but figuring out from which two primes 221 was multiplied from, that’s hard. As in, you just have try dividing it by random primes until it divides cleanly.

    Sufficiently powerful quantum computers will break that principle, because an algorithm already exists for them, which makes it so you don’t have to randomly try anymore. This algorithm is called Shor’s Algorithm.

    So, we also know the solution to this problem, which is to pick another such one-way calculation to encrypt your stuff. Elliptic-Curve Cryptography is most prominently used here.

    It certainly wouldn’t need to be Zoom’s top priority and there’s no guarantee that we won’t have algorithms to also break ECC when quantum computers come around. But this one was already solved “down the stack”, so it was easy for Zoom to implement. And plugging the future holes we do already know about, is still good.