cr.yp.to: 2025.01.18: As expensive as a plane flight
Should you be investing time and effort in upgrading to post-quantum cryptography? You may have encountered the following arguments for minimizing the investment.
The cost-is-high argument. You'll be discouraged from taking action to upgrade if you're surrounded by people saying how hard this is. For example: "Post-quantum cryptography is the biggest cybersecurity transition ever!" (If you haven't heard this sort of thing: here are some random examples.)
People will often make the transition sound complicated the same way they can make anything sound complicated, namely by adding layers of bureaucracy. Here's how I summarized this in a 2023 talk to the Federal Reserve TechLab: "We'll form a committee to devise an action plan to inventory current usage of cryptography to support future assessment of the steps needed to build a best-practices playbook for meeting the performance challenges of upgrading to post-quantum cryptography, with a target date after I retire."
You'll be much more motivated to upgrade if you instead hear examples of post-quantum crypto already being deployed. It can't be that difficult if it's already working for millions of users.
