The Quantum Threat

The world’s data is currently protected as it moves across the internet by public key encryption algorithms such as RSA, Elliptic Curve and ElGamal.

Although these algorithms have revolutionized information security and have served the world well by enabling digital commerce, secure communications and remote access to financial services, they are also based on computational power which will be surpassed by the advent of Quantum computing.

With this new processing power comes the ability to break existing security protocols and systems so it is imperative that the quantum community address these security issues.

Quantum computers can break current public key encryption, this is fact. These devices are commercially available, and once they start to become the backbone of government and public company systems, they will obviously need the same levels of security as we see with today’s current technology frameworks. Rapid progress in their development means that they are now a business risk, one requiring mitigation strategies today.

Information that needs to be secure in the future, needs to be considered now.

The risk of quantum code breaking is so pressing that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched a process to develop the next generation of cryptography. The same sentiments have been expressed in China and both countries, deemed the leaders in the field have vowed to determine protocols that span the globe and truly secure data.

Compounding this commercial activity, the National Security Agency (NSA) warned in 2015 that progress in quantum computing had reached a point that organizations should deploy encryption algorithms that are thought to withstand attacks from such machines.

It is expected that an organization will announce quantum supremacy – the point at which a quantum computer’s capabilities exceed those of classical computers, and we predict this to be around 50 qubits – easily achievable in the next few years.