Ah. That’s a misunderstanding on my part, and a good news story. Still don’t want to wake up tomorrow and see a published AES break, though.

A MITM doesn’t require decrypting. It just requires telling a convincing enough lie to each side of a conversation that they think they’re talking to the other party. Then you end up encrypting to their key which they can just read. That’s different from breaking the encryption.

Are you sure they can’t decrypt?

No, and none of the state actors who do that kind of stuff will ever tell you. Watch The Imitation Game for a good/bad time and some context.

If you had a break for the modern crypto schemes and published it right now you would shut down all digital commerce, a lot of the spy traffic if not most of it¹, and nothing could be started back up again until everything was redone from scratch. Best hope would be that the post quantum algorithms² the cryptographers have aren’t succeptible to whatever you did to break the existing algorithms. It’d take a bit to get the software implementations and keys in place, etc. The hardware stuff would take longer.

• [1] The stuff using One Time Pads would still be fine, but its limitations wouldn’t take the place all of all the rest of it.
• [2] The rollout of post quantum algorithms is going on now on a more accelerated schedule than originally planned.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/old-fidelity-study-goes-viral-reveals-why-dead-investors-perform-best-13631692.html

There are four version of x86_64: v1, v2, v3, and v4.

RHEL 9 dropped support for anything prior to v3. That means RockyLinux doesn’t cover it, either. AlmaLinux has support for v2 in version 10, but there’s no way of knowing how long that will last.

Some binary packages are starting to drop support for earlier version. The latest numpy out of pip will not work on a v1 machine. You can sometimes use the system package manager’s numpy to work around it, or constrain pip to use an older numpy. I don’t know what else is lurking out there.

If you’ve got visions of taking a really old computer that you happened to max out on RAM back in the day and bringing it back to life there are surprises waiting for you.

I don’t know what he’s talking about, but maybe he’s saying that the US already has quantum computers capable of breaking modern cryptography, and that it’s time to move to Post Quantum Cryptography (PGC). The process is pretty far along:

• https://postquantum.com/industry-news/microsoft-pqc-windows/
• https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/whats-new-post-quantum-cryptography-rhel-101

Both sites mention “harvest now, decrypt later.” That’s an attack where someone could scoop up all the encrypted traffic/files/whatever, and just store it until quantum computers are effective at breaking it. Because of the nature of the topic nobody who knows for sure is going to say, but it’s not going to be cheap to replace all the crypto out there with PGC so there’s a reason to think there’s a need even if nobody will confirm anything. I personally think just the possibility of the attack is enough reason to move if the algorithms are already in place. If you’ve got encrypted data and you expected it to stay unreadable for hundreds of years, then there’s reason to think that’s not achievable right now.

https://nist.pqcrypto.org/foia/20250114/djb pqc paper.pdf