Quantum Computers: The Threat That Makes Encryption Useless

Announcements Videos
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Do quantum computers have the ability to break our encryption, and are they actually a threat to the privacy of our communications? In this video, we dig into the details and separate fact from Silicon Valley hype!

Hey everyone, we’ve received quite a few comments in our community about whether a certain cryptography algorithm is quantum safe or not and whether it affects symmetric encryption, so we decided to do a video about it. A lot of the coverage of quantum computers is rather over-hyped, so I hope you appreciate our more realistic approach here.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you think. I hope you enjoy the video and learn something :innocent:

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Neat.tube :slightly_smiling_face:

edit. It’s a good video too, now that I’ve had time to watch it!

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Great introduction video on the subject thanks team !

Does NIST annoucement have been made futher from the HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) one ?

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HQC and ML-KEM are still the two standardized methods from NIST. The sixth PQC standardization conference from NIST was literally just held yesterday, so maybe there will be more news from them very soon.

I saw Signal spoke at this event https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/presentations/2025/post-quantum-ratcheting-for-signal/post-quantum_ratcheting-schmidt_1.14.pdf

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thanks @jonah for the link. Do you think the endgame for E2EE is homomorphic encryption ?

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No, that is not very related and has very little practical use. Off-loading compute to a remote cloud server is generally a bad thing even with E2EE.

The main place it’s useful is looking up things in a centralized database, like looking up new contacts on a server, looking up businesses or favicons in a central database; without the database operator knowing what you’re looking up.

That gives it very limited potential for things like messenger apps, caller ID apps, and password managers. Tbh all of that can be done with homomorphic encryption even today.

Anything more complex than that should be performed locally, and encrypted with modern standards we already have today if it’s being sent off-device.

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Indeed, never took the time to think about this deeper. :thinking: thanks again.

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Darn, I can no longer be the first to comment or compliment on new content anymore. Didn’t realize the exclusive first look at new stuff for members only is already in effect.

Nonetheless, great video as usual!

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This is more likely than not a small nitpick so I could be wrong here but the background volume sounded as loud as the voice in this one. This appears to be a one off from the prior videos since they were significantly improved from the first few. Perhaps double check it next time?

Again, could only be me but that’s what I observed.

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I love PrivacyGuides videos :heart: except mention of Cloudflare this time:

It is quite an interesting statistic, but does it matter, if its centralized and decrypted in the middle.

I also watched a talk from Proton Mail employees about status of their post-quantum encryption efforts: FOSDEM 2025 - Post-Quantum Cryptography in OpenPGP

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I have PipePipe set to hide all paid content. The downside it PP doesn’t show the videos once they are free. Bummer.

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To be clear we weren’t recommending Cloudflare or anything of the sort just using them for statistics on web traffic.

I agree that there are issues with centralisation around Cloudflare, but in this instance it actually is a good source for information around the adoption of post-quantum encryption because of how large they are.

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Whether you’re first or not your comments and feedback are always great, so thank you Johnny for always leaving a message. :smiley:

They definitely weren’t the same volume but yeah I agree it could have been turned down a touch. Although I think it was very easy to understand what I was saying despite the slightly louder background music volume.

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