The Snowden quote at the bottom of every single Werner Koch email has been living rent-free in my head since 2013. Also the fact that this project has been running since the late 90s, financed almost entirely by donations, and is quietly protecting basically all serious encrypted communication on the planet — and the announcement still goes out as a plain text email to a mailing list. No Medium post. No Twitter thread. No 'we're excited to share'. Just: here's the tarball, here's the SHA-1, verify it. Absolute last line of defense energy.
> introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption
algorithm
Funny to read 1-liner changelog versus the plethora of articles just few years ago along the line of "Quantum computer, it might just change our entire lives and make privacy impossible!".
The simple addition (of a not so simple algorithm) to the software (and few others, e.g. OpenSSL) and voila, me can move on with our daily lives. Cryptography and computational complexity are truly amazing.
been thinking about this a bit. someone just tell me what algo to use and ill start using it now. are the quantum-resistant cryptos significantly slower?
Basically the idea is use hybrid. AES-GCM-256 or ChaCha20-Poly1305 for symmetric encryption (which is already PQ-safe), and ML-KEM looks set to become the standard for key encapsulation.
ML-KEM-768 is fast as an algorithm, faster than X25519 in terms of pure computation, but uses large keys, so has higher overheads on small payloads. Most of the time, they’re about equal, or the absolute time is so slow it doesn’t matter.
Most folks now are doing hybrid ML-KEM and X25519 to guard against undiscovered flaws in ML-KEM.
For people reading this, you may want to know the the NSA is allegedly trying to weaken hybrid ML-KEM and X25519 down to just ML-KEM. This is a good thing to pay attention to!
I believe ML-KEM is the standard algorithm for post-quantum asymmetric encryption. I think it's slower mainly because there's not good hardware support, but it shouldn't be a big deal because most encryption is hybrid where you only use the asymmetric crypto briefly to share a secret you can use for symmetric cryptography.
ML-KEM based on a lattice problem called "Learning With Errors", and there are similar lattice-based algorithms which have no known quantum speedup. Most traditional asymmetric encryption algorithms are based on number-theoretic assumptions like the discrete logarithm problem or the RSA assumption, which are broken by Shor's algorithm.
Symmetric cryptography (AES and SHA hash functions) are post-quantum resistant for now. Grover's algorithm technically cuts their asymptotic security in half, but that doesn't parallelize, so practically there is no known good quantum attack, and cryptographers and standards agencies tend to not worry about that. You can keep using those.
[edit: according to the sister comment posted simulataneously ML-KEM is faster than X25519. good to know!]
The Snowden quote at the bottom of every single Werner Koch email has been living rent-free in my head since 2013. Also the fact that this project has been running since the late 90s, financed almost entirely by donations, and is quietly protecting basically all serious encrypted communication on the planet — and the announcement still goes out as a plain text email to a mailing list. No Medium post. No Twitter thread. No 'we're excited to share'. Just: here's the tarball, here's the SHA-1, verify it. Absolute last line of defense energy.
> introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption algorithm
Funny to read 1-liner changelog versus the plethora of articles just few years ago along the line of "Quantum computer, it might just change our entire lives and make privacy impossible!".
The simple addition (of a not so simple algorithm) to the software (and few others, e.g. OpenSSL) and voila, me can move on with our daily lives. Cryptography and computational complexity are truly amazing.
been thinking about this a bit. someone just tell me what algo to use and ill start using it now. are the quantum-resistant cryptos significantly slower?
Basically the idea is use hybrid. AES-GCM-256 or ChaCha20-Poly1305 for symmetric encryption (which is already PQ-safe), and ML-KEM looks set to become the standard for key encapsulation.
ML-KEM-768 is fast as an algorithm, faster than X25519 in terms of pure computation, but uses large keys, so has higher overheads on small payloads. Most of the time, they’re about equal, or the absolute time is so slow it doesn’t matter.
Most folks now are doing hybrid ML-KEM and X25519 to guard against undiscovered flaws in ML-KEM.
For people reading this, you may want to know the the NSA is allegedly trying to weaken hybrid ML-KEM and X25519 down to just ML-KEM. This is a good thing to pay attention to!
Here is a 6-part article about the topic: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html
I believe ML-KEM is the standard algorithm for post-quantum asymmetric encryption. I think it's slower mainly because there's not good hardware support, but it shouldn't be a big deal because most encryption is hybrid where you only use the asymmetric crypto briefly to share a secret you can use for symmetric cryptography.
ML-KEM based on a lattice problem called "Learning With Errors", and there are similar lattice-based algorithms which have no known quantum speedup. Most traditional asymmetric encryption algorithms are based on number-theoretic assumptions like the discrete logarithm problem or the RSA assumption, which are broken by Shor's algorithm.
Symmetric cryptography (AES and SHA hash functions) are post-quantum resistant for now. Grover's algorithm technically cuts their asymptotic security in half, but that doesn't parallelize, so practically there is no known good quantum attack, and cryptographers and standards agencies tend to not worry about that. You can keep using those.
[edit: according to the sister comment posted simulataneously ML-KEM is faster than X25519. good to know!]
GnuPG Version 2.5.19
The 2.5 series are improvements for 64 bit Windows and the introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption algorithm.
The old 2.4 series reaches end-of-life in just two months.