Temporada 2 · Cartas desde el Polvo Marciano · JVV-T2-14
Public-key blackout: chronicle of a post-RSA day
I Hour zero
07 h UTC. Laboratories in Shandong publish a pre-print: an array of 10,000 superconducting qubits factorises an RSA-2048 modulus in 43 minutes.
08 h UTC. The paper flies around Telegram and X; banks fire their “post-quantum” protocols.
10 h UTC. • GitHub briefly collapses as OSS projects rush to regenerate their keys.
14 h UTC. • Expired TLS certificates shut out 17 % of small .gov sites—there are not enough staff to renew them.
18 h UTC. The crypto market fights over a code fork: exchanges suspend withdrawals while malicious scripts “re-sign” messages inside wallets still on RSA.
The public-key blackout was no light going out but a signal of trust flickering on a millisecond scale.
II Why it fell so fast
| Inherited dependence | Reason for the instant failure |
|---|---|
| TLS 1.2 RSA handshake | Hundreds of thousands of legacy servers still with no P-256 + AEAD |
| IoT firmware from 2015-2022 | It cannot be updated; OTP chips with an embedded key |
| Sanctioned countries | Impossible to import signed post-quantum modules; they stayed on RSA by default |
| Software signatures | Historic installers (.exe, .deb) now forgeable; the chain of trust broken |
III Lines of defence that held
-
Hybrid certificates (X.509+Dilithium)
– Platforms already using NIST PQC signatures held, even with the extra latency. -
Blind channels with PSK
– VPNs that renegotiate with rotating pre-shared keys stayed opaque. -
Hardware enclaves
– Some “dual-stack” HSM cards voided the RSA path and moved to Kyber768 without rebooting.
IV Social and economic cascade
- Mobile micropayments in the global South cut off for 6 h; the use of physical cash doubled.
- Hospitals: old monitors refused HL7 connections; doctors printed results instead of sending them to the cloud.
- Disinformation: verified accounts with revoked PGP sent out false shortage bulletins, setting off panic buying.
V Emergency plan (72 h)
| Horizon | Emergency action | Responsible party |
|---|---|---|
| 6 h | List the critical services still on RSA, isolate them on an internal VLAN | National CSIRTs |
| 24 h | Distribute patches with PQC signatures + a timestamp on a public blockchain (an anchor against spoofing) | Vendors / OSS maintainers |
| 48 h | Release a micro-bypass for non-updatable IoT: a tunnel to a Kyber-wrapped gateway | Telco operators |
| 72 h | Force HSTS-preload to PQ suites only; mass revocation of RSA certs | Certificate authorities |
(Abstract technical detail; no attack vectors are included.)
VI Lessons for day +1
-
Living cryptography
– “Quantum-safe” is not enough; it needs replacement cycles every 5 years and constant community audit. -
Micro-firmware sovereignty
– Countries and companies: build update routes outside export controls so as not to be trapped in legacy hardware. -
Social backup
– Forms, manuals and eventual paper processes ready in critical industries: resilience includes the analogue. -
Education
– Train users to check PQC fingerprints the way they check the TLS padlock today.
VII Coda
“Digital trust is a crystal: it shines until a single photon goes through it.”
The collapse of RSA did not kill the network; it exposed how much we had staked on an algorithm with no evacuation plan.
The day after the blackout, cryptography turned plural: lattice, hash-based, error-correcting code… and the awareness that no foundation is eternal.