> People claimed all the basics were done, that we "only" needed to scale.

This claim is fundamentally different from what you quoted.

> But who's prepping for unlimited energy today?

It's about tradoffs: It costs almost nothing to switch to PQC methods, but i can't see a way to "prep for unlimited energy" that doesn't come with huge cost/time-waste in the case that doesn't happen

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thayne 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It's about tradoffs: It costs almost nothing to switch to PQC methods,

It costs:

- development time to switch things over

- more computation, and thus more energy, because PQC algorithms aren't as efficient as classical ones

- more bandwidth, because PQC algorithms require larger keys

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throw0101a 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It costs:

Not wrong, but given these algorithms are mostly used at setup, how much cost is actually being occurred compared to the entire session? Certainly if your sessions are short-lived then the 'overhead' of PQC/hybrid is higher, but I'd be curious to know the actually byte and energy costs over and above non-PQC/hybrid, i.e., how many bytes/joules for a non-PQC exchange and how many more by adding PQC. E.g.

> Unfortunately, many of the proposed post-quantum cryptographic primitives have significant drawbacks compared to existing mechanisms, in particular producing outputs that are much larger. For signatures, a state of the art classical signature scheme is Ed25519, which produces 64-byte signatures and 32-byte public keys, while for widely-used RSA-2048 the values are around 256 bytes for both. Compare this to the lowest security strength ML-DSA post-quantum signature scheme, which has signatures of 2,420 bytes (i.e., over 2kB!) and public keys that are also over a kB in size (1,312 bytes). For encryption, the equivalent would be comparing X25519 as a KEM (32-byte public keys and ciphertexts) with ML-KEM-512 (800-byte PK, 768-byte ciphertext).

* https://neilmadden.blog/2025/06/20/are-we-overthinking-post-...

"The impact of data-heavy, post-quantum TLS 1.3 on the Time-To-Last-Byte of real-world connections" (PDF):

* https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/Events/2024/fifth-pqc-stand...

(And development time is also generally one-time.)

	▲	thayne 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		For an individual session, the cost is certainly small. But in aggregate it adds up. I don't think the cost is large, and I agree that given the tradeoff, the cost is probably worth it, but there is a cost, and I'm not sure it can be categorized as "almost nothing".

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djmdjm 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> - development time to switch things over

This is a one time cost, and generally the implementations we're switching to are better quality than the classical algorithms they replace. For instance, the implementation of ML-KEM we use in OpenSSH comes from Cryspen's libcrux[1], which is formally-verified and quite fast.

[1] https://github.com/cryspen/libcrux

> - more computation, and thus more energy, because PQC algorithms aren't as efficient as classical ones

ML-KEM is very fast. In OpenSSH it's much faster than classic DH at the same security level and only slightly slower than ECDH/X25519.

> - more bandwidth, because PQC algorithms require larger keys

For key agreement, it's barely noticeable. ML-KEM public keys are slightly over 1Kb. Again this is larger than ECDH but comparable to classic DH.

PQ signatures are larger, e.g. a ML-DSA signature is about 3Kb but again this only happens once or twice per SSH connection and is totally lost in the noise.

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fxwin 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

all of which are costs that pale in comparison to having your data compromised, depending on what it is

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bee_rider 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Anyway, what does prepping for unlimited energy look like? I guess, favoring electrical over fossil fuels. But for normal people and the vast majority of companies, that looks like preparing for mass renewable electricity anyway, which is already a good thing to do.

	▲	thesz 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		With limitless energy you can have "fossil fuel" synthesized from air and water [1] and use existing "fossil fuel" infrastructure. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/10/fuel-from-air/
	▲	fxwin 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		could also be just massively scaling up energy consumption with little concern for efficiency (since limitless would imply very low cost), which would probably be a bad idea for renewables, and in case of not-so-cheap energy also very expensive