Quantum Computing Report: The Cryptopocalypse is Coming. A reminder of the basics of cryptography, quantum computing, and the threat to, and vulnerability of encryption, is the way to get the week started. Lost in the shine of quantum computing technology recently, the vulnerability of your data and your client’s data could hang in the balance in the coming 5 to 10 years, at the arrival of quantum supremacy. Qubit.
Impacts of Quantum Computing. Excerpts: Professionals in cybersecurity and cryptography (and even non-IT executives) are hearing about the coming threat from quantum computing. It’s reaching the mainstream business consciousness.
With quantum computing, mathematical problems such as discrete logarithms and integer factorization are exponentially faster. This matters because integer factorization and discrete logarithms are the (at least for now) hard (i.e., expensive and time-consuming) problems that provide security for certain types of cryptographic protocols. Say these problems become easy, meaning fast and cheap. Public key encryption, key establishment and key exchange protocols (e.g., TLS), trust in digital signatures, and the authenticity provided by digital certificates would all be catastrophically impacted. The systems that enable national security, the economy, distributed commerce, and secure and trustworthy communications, would become obsolete – overnight.
