Crypto: Ethereum Already ‘20%’ Of The Way Toward Quantum Resilience: Interview

Ethereum has a “clear plan” for post-quantum security involving major upgrades to execution, consensus and even data blobs, explains researcher Antonio Sanso.

Antonio Sanso, cryptography researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, is confident the blockchain will be quantum secure long before a quantum attack is even possible.”We as the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and Ethereum community are working massively on this topic,” he told Cointelegraph.“The research part is probably the part that has been already figured out. And we are starting with the execution phase of it. And we’re really confident we’re gonna meet the timeline and the deadline.”

The EF has declared post-quantum (PQ) security a top strategic priority. On Jan. 24, it announced the formation of a Post Quantum team led by Thomas Coratger. Sanso is leading its new biweekly All Core Devs calls on post-quantum security from Feb. 4.

It’s a massive undertaking. He explained that Ethereum’s execution, consensus and data availability layers all need to be upgraded.”When we talk about having a post-quantum solution, we are not talking about one part — there are all the different big macro areas of Ethereum that need to be migrated,” he said.

Asked to put a figure on how far work has progressed to date, Sanso said solutions for the different layers are progressing at different rates, “so there is not one percentage for all three. But we are like, ballpark, probably 20%.”

The new biweekly call will discuss the benefits and trade-offs of different approaches. Multi-client post-quantum devnets are now live, and a PQ roadmap will be released soon, targeting what EF researcher Justin Drake calls “a full transition in coming years with zero loss of funds and zero downtime.”

Making Ethereum quantum-resilient is just one part of a complete overhaul of the entire blockchain as part of Lean Ethereum. The aim is to make Ethereum faster, simpler and more decentralized using zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, while also making it resistant to quantum attacks.

The enthusiasm for quantum proofing Ethereum is in stark contrast to Bitcoin, where leaders from Adam Back to Michael Saylor have played down the need for change, pointing to estimates that suggest a quantum computer might be many years or decades away.

Which is true, but with caveats. At DevConnect in Buenos Aires, co-founder Vitalik Buterin noted the median prediction for a quantum computer to break cryptography was 2040, but there was still a 20% chance it coul

Source: CoinTelegraph