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McEliece not more save?

For years, we have been advocating for strong encryption to protect privacy. Whether it’s emails or your own data on a USB drive or your laptop — all of it should always be encrypted. For email, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP or Gnu-PG) by Phil Zimmermann has remained the standard since the 1980s (Email Encryption with PGP).

As computing power has advanced over the years, key lengths have also increased from 1,024 to 4,096 bits. However, with the advent of the first functional quantum computers, it has become clear that encryption methods previously considered secure can now be cracked within a reasonable amount of time. New encryption methods were needed. One example of truly secure encryption — even against a quantum computer — has been McEliece, which Theo Tenzer also recommends on our website in his book .

There are now serious concerns about McEliece as a quantum-computer-secure algorithm, which have recently been confirmed by the BSI. However, users of McEliece do not need to worry for the time being, because although the algorithm’s security has been downgraded from an estimated 2^200 bit operations to approximately 2^114, This means McEliece still offers greater security than the currently widely used AES-128, which ranges from 2^94 to 2^102 bit operations. So for “home use,” everything remains the same for now. However, the researchers have learned that their theoretical calculations regarding an algorithm’s security have been corrected by the practical capabilities of existing quantum computers (publication by Stephen A. Weis of Anthropic).

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)