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Do we need a new session paradigm? Could quantum crack it?
2 points by danschumann on Oct 24, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
Currently, a lot of websites "trust" the session because it would be very hard to crack.. and therefore variables like `user_id` are stored on the session, and that's cool because a user couldn't decrypt, change the user_id, and re-encrypt it.

But, if quantum computers make it possible to crack session encryption pretty easily.. well.. what about just a long token for a user.. and the actual user_id values are stored in the database, keyed by the token?



Quantum algorithms have the potential to crack public key algorithms, affecting things like SSL. Session data would not be encrypted with a public key algorithm.




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