I think you’re going to need about 10,000,000 qbits to divert a transaction, but that’s still within foreseeable scale. I think it’s extreme likely that the foundation will have finished their quantum resistance planning before we get to 10MM coherent qbits, but still, it’s a potential scenario.
More likely that other critical infrastructure failures will happen within trad-finance, much larger vulnerability footprint, and being able to trivially reverse engineer every logged SSL session is likely to be a much more impactful turn of events. I’d venture that there are significant ear-on-the-wire efforts going on right now in anticipation of a reasonable bulk SSL de cloaking solution. Right now we think it doesn’t matter who can see our “secure” traffic. I think that is going to change, retroactively, in a big way.
Hopefully replay attacks will not be useful, but confidential information will be abundant. There will be actionable information mixed in there , and it will be a lot of data. Just imagine if everything whispered suddenly became shouted.
More likely that other critical infrastructure failures will happen within trad-finance, much larger vulnerability footprint, and being able to trivially reverse engineer every logged SSL session is likely to be a much more impactful turn of events. I’d venture that there are significant ear-on-the-wire efforts going on right now in anticipation of a reasonable bulk SSL de cloaking solution. Right now we think it doesn’t matter who can see our “secure” traffic. I think that is going to change, retroactively, in a big way.