I'm not a believer (I'm not qualified to have an opinion but neither is almost anyone else here) in PQC, but to be clear, the logic behind moving forward on PQC is straightforward: everybody acknowledges that there are no known useful QC attacks on cryptography, nor really any on the horizon, but adversaries can easily stockpile terabytes of recorded network conversations today and keep them around to break when QC attacks do work.

If you think QC attacks are 20 years away from real-world demonstrations, then conventional cryptography has a 20-year ceiling, which would be a hair-on-fire analysis in any other context. How long are you willing to bet conventional cryptography will hold out? 50 years is also too short by cryptographic standards. And 50 years is a long time. You willing to bet 100 years? I am, but, like, nobody should listen to me on this.

This is also why KEMs are a priority over signatures for PQC deployment.

> Jumping is also real, but we need not worry about people jumping out of the atmosphere.

If people are jumping twice as high this year than last, we would ;) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-chart-shows-the-progre...

(BTW this reply is not meant to make a point about the state of quantum -- it's complicated -- but merely as a response to the analogy)

Wait, isn't the point of post-quantum crypto to be as good as existing crypto but also be secure against known quantum attacks like Shor's algorithm and factoring. I don't think the goal is to trade off anything for defenses against quantum attacks.

If anything these stories should be more confidence inducing. They show that the rollout is conservative and that the system works. PQC algorithm has a flaw and it is found. FWIW the way existing traditional crypto is proven safe is pretty much the same -- get a bunch of people to work on attacks and weed out the bad stuff.