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According to experts, modern public key encryption is good enough to meet the needs of the business. Nowadays, most cyberattacks target different parts of the security stack, including unsophisticated users. Yet, according to experts, the advent of quantum computing will erode this solid building block of modern computing.
"About 99 percent of online encryption is vulnerable to quantum computers," said Mark Jackson, chief scientist at Cambridge Quantum Computing, at the Inside Quantum Technology conference in Boston.
Quantum computers – those that use the principles of quantum entanglement and superposition to represent information instead of electrical bits – are able to execute certain types of computation order faster than conventional electronic computers. These are more or less marginal technologies in 2019, but their development has accelerated in recent years, and experts at the IQT conference said that a peak deployment could occur as early as 2024.
Lawrence Gasman, President of IQT, compared the current state of development of quantum computing to that of fiber optic networking in the 1980s – a promising technology but still lacking one or two essential pieces .
"Optical amplifiers have enabled optical networking," he said. "Without them, they would never really have changed into what they are today."
Pure research, the military sector and the financial sector are the main drivers of quantum computing in general and quantum security in particular, according to Gasman. The latter, in particular, was one of the first to embrace technology enthusiastically.
"If you look at the amount of money lost because of credit card fraud, it's a determining factor," he noted.
A shift to different types of conventional encryption – some algorithms have proven to be resistant to quantum computing – or to quantum computing-based security is going to be needed.
Security technology based on quantum computing is effective because it relies on two of the best known properties of quantum physics: the idea that the observation of a particle changes its behavior and that paired or "entangled" particles share the same set of properties as the other. .
This basically means that both parties to a message can share an identical encryption key, thanks to a quantum entanglement. In addition, if a third party tried to listen to this sharing, it would break the symmetry of tangled pairs and it would instantly become apparent that something was going wrong.
"If everything works perfectly, everything should be synchronized. But if something goes wrong, it means you'll see a difference, "said Jackson.
According to Brian Lowy, vice president of ID Quantum SA, a Swiss-based quantum computing provider, it's like a soap bubble.
"At some point, you will have to take into account [quantum computing], "He said, noting that even now, bad actors could download encrypted information now, planning to crack his defenses once quantum computing would be up to the task.
According to Paul Lucier, vice president of sales and business development at Isara, provider of quantum computing security solutions, the day of change will vary by industry.
Devices with short life expectancy, such as smartphones, are not in immediate danger because quantum security technology must be sufficiently miniaturized at a time when quantum code decoding is powerful enough to compromise modern public-key encryption .
It's sectors like the auto industry and the infrastructure sector that have to worry, Lucier said. Anything that has a long life and everything that is expensive to repair and replace is potentially vulnerable.
This does not mean that it is time to immediately make a replacement. Standardization bodies are expected to approve quantum ciphering algorithms at about the same time as experts predict that quantum-power decryption threatens modern security. A hybrid approach is therefore possible.
But the threat is real, so much so that the The National Quantum Initiative Act came into effect last December. The law provides for the establishment of formal advisory groups by the executive and directs the funding of research toward further exploration of quantum computing technology.
So be ready, the experts at the IQT conference all agreed.
"We think by 2026, if you're not ready with your systems prepared, you're taking a huge risk," said Lucier.
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