{"id":206812,"date":"2026-04-21T12:35:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T12:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/contrary-to-popular-superstition-aes-128-is-just-fine-in-a-post-quantum-world\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T12:35:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T12:35:20","slug":"contrary-to-popular-superstition-aes-128-is-just-fine-in-a-post-quantum-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/contrary-to-popular-superstition-aes-128-is-just-fine-in-a-post-quantum-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world.<\/p>\n<p>AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Advanced_Encryption_Standard\">Advanced Encryption Standard<\/a>, a block cipher suite formally adopted by NIST in 2001. While the specification allows 192- and 256-bit key sizes, AES 128 was widely considered to be the preferred one because it meets the sweet spot between computational resources required to use it and the security it offers. With no known vulnerabilities in its 30-year history, a brute-force attack is the only known way to break it. With 2<sup>128<\/sup> or 3.4 x 10<sup>38<\/sup> possible key combinations, such an attack would take about 9 billion years using the entire bitcoin mining resources as of 2026.<\/p>\n<h2>It boils down to parallelization<\/h2>\n<p>Over the past decade, something interesting happened to all that public confidence. Amateur cryptographers and mathematicians twisted a series of equations known as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grover%27s_algorithm\">Grover\u2019s algorithm<\/a> to declare the death of AES 128 once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) came into being. They said a CRQC would halve the effective strength to just 2<sup>64<\/sup>, a small enough supply that\u2014if true\u2014would allow the same bitcoin mining resources to brute force it in less than a second (the comparison is purely for illustration purposes; a CRQC almost certainly couldn\u2019t run like clusters of bitcoin ASICs and more importantly couldn\u2019t parallelize the workload as the amateurs assume).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2026\/04\/contrary-to-popular-superstition-aes-128-is-just-fine-in-a-post-quantum-world\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2026\/04\/contrary-to-popular-superstition-aes-128-is-just-fine-in-a-post-quantum-world\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"wpematico_credit\"><small>Powered by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wpematico.com\" target=\"_blank\">WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world. AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the Advanced Encryption Standard, a block cipher suite formally adopted by&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world - UshopWell.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/contrary-to-popular-superstition-aes-128-is-just-fine-in-a-post-quantum-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world - UshopWell.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world. 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