Technology

And fix the fact that it’s really hard to implement without gaping side channel vulnerabilities, but that’s not really a quantum computer problem.

Technically correct. You would buy time well past the end of the universe. Advances in either quantum or conventional computers would not change this. There are theoretical limits at play.

Now, maybe you can find a way to substantially reduce the difficulty of breaking it over brute force. Cryptographers have been trying to break AES for 30 years now and haven't found one that does more than marginal improvement. But it's possible.

How big are your packets at that point? Seems like you're steadily clogging up your web traffic and setting yourself up for disruption vulnerability down the line if your only response is to inflate the size of every message.

It's not enough to simply have your data be secure. You need it to be reliable. And larger packets require more bandwidth which means more robust hardware and more reliable transmission equipment. Also cuts into the viability of stealthy communications if you know the minimum transmission size of your adversary.

I'm not sure I follow. Could you expand on that?

EDIT: Wikipedia says this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

In contrast to the threat quantum computing poses to current public-key algorithms, most current symmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash functions are considered to be relatively secure against attacks by quantum computers.[2][11] While the quantum Grover's algorithm does speed up attacks against symmetric ciphers, doubling the key size can effectively block these attacks.[12] Thus post-quantum symmetric cryptography does not need to differ significantly from current symmetric cryptography.

The citation there is from a 2010 paper, which is old and is just saying that this is believed to be the case.

This page, a year old, says that it is believed that the weakening from use of Grover's algorithm is not sufficient to make AES-128 practically breakable, and that at some point in recent years it was determined that the doubling was not necessary.

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/102671/is-aes-128-quantum-safe

Keeping in mind that I am about twenty years behind the current situation and am just skimming this, it sounds like the situation is that one cannot use an attack that previously had been believed to be a route to break some shorter key length AES using quantum computing, so as things stand today, we don't know of a practical route to defeat current-keylength AES using any known quantum computing algorithm, even as quantum computers grow in capability.

Hahses don't use encryption

Because hashes are deterministic one way functions - they're generally one way only

Let's say I hash a picture. It could go from 14MB to 128 digits of base 64 - there's orders of magnitude less information in the hash than in the source data

Now - with that hash can you rebuild the picture? You've lost a great deal of information, you don't necessarily even know the size or the format of the input.

Let's set up an equation - x is the input (the photo), so hash_func(x) = hashx

There are multiple, maybe infinite (depending on the hashing function) values of x that will solve our equation. In the case of the photo, most of it will be random combinations of pixels that mean nothing to a human. There could also randomly be things that appear meaningful, but without knowing more about the original you could never be sure if you have the correct answer

Now, passwords might actually be shorter than the resulting hash, but we salt them so each password hash function works differently, and can still destroy information from the original password. Part of the password and the salt are then used as basically the seed for a deterministic random function to generate this extra information

Again, you have the dual problem of a huge problem space as well as an inability to be sure you have the original input or just another solution

Ultimately, everything is defeatable, and if you can narrow down the problem space (say, by knowing the length of a password, having enough known before and after data, or finding a bias in the algorithm), you can reduce the needed computations by orders of magnitude and make it feasible. Quantum computers also grow exponentially with chained qbits, so I expect someone clever will figure it out sooner or later

Because you cannot reverse a hash. Information is lost from the result.

They asked AI to crack DES lol

My point is that AES isn't untouched by quantumn computing. We now have quantumn safe asymmetric key encryption, too.

Grover's algorithm gives broad asymptotic speed-ups to many kinds of brute-force attacks on symmetric-key cryptography.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm#Cryptography

In many cases the key exchange (kex) for symmetric ciphers are done using slower asymmetric ciphers. Many of which are vulnerable to quantum algos to various degrees.

So even when attacking AES you'd ideally do it indirectly by targeting the kex.