Hackers On Planet Earth

Harvest Now, Decrypt Later

redshiftzero

For decades, public key cryptography has relied on mathematical hardness assumptions (the difficulty of factoring large numbers and computing discrete logarithms) that within several years may no longer hold. The arrival of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer capable of breaking RSA and elliptic curve cryptography is in the future, and the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat means encrypted traffic captured today could be retroactively decrypted by nation state actors. This talk recaps where we are with the post-quantum transition: NIST’s multi-year standardization process culminating in ML-KEM and ML-DSA for key encapsulation and signatures, the hard problems that underpin them, and the state of ecosystem migration.

Sunday 1000 Gramercy Park Suite

redshiftzero is the chief technology officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), where she oversees the organization’s engineering teams. She is an engineer, researcher, and cypherpunk. Prior to this role she worked on applied cryptography for privacy-preserving payments and previously led development for the SecureDrop whistleblower platform. She is a recovering physicist and holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Chicago.