While dealing with the immediate threat posed by hackers, US government officials are also planning for a longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted material now in the hopes of being able to decrypt it later. Quantum computers, which work in a totally different way than the conventional computers we use, pose a threat. They use quantum bits instead of regular bits made up of 1s and 0s, which can represent multiple values at the same time.
Quantum computers' complexity could make them significantly faster at specific tasks, allowing them to solve issues that are currently hard for modern machines to handle, such as cracking many of the encryption schemes used to safeguard sensitive data including personal, trade, and state secrets.
“For all the dramatic advances offered by quantum computing, it could create a huge threat to the security of our data,” Terry Halvorsen, IBM’s general manager for client and solutions development in the Federal and Public market. “It offers the powerful potential to break certain types of cryptography that safeguards many critical communications."
Despite the fact that quantum computers are still in their infancy, are extremely expensive, and are riddled with issues, officials say attempts to protect the country from this long-term threat must begin immediately.
“The threat of a nation-state adversary getting a large quantum computer and being able to access your information is real,” says Dustin Moody, a mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “The threat is that they copy down your encrypted data and hold on to it until they have a quantum computer.”
Faced with this "harvest now, decipher later" policy, officials are working to create and implement new encryption algorithms to protect secrets from a new breed of supercomputers. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, claims to be leading a long and challenging transition to post-quantum cryptography.
Quantum computers may be able to defeat asymmetric encryption systems based on integer factorization or discrete logarithms in a matter of seconds. Everyone, from financial services corporations to government organizations, is concerned about this. To protect electronic mortgage data, digital signatures may need to be secure for up to 30 years.
Experts estimate that quantum computers will take a decade or more to achieve anything significant, but with money flowing into the field in both China and the United States, the race is on to make it happen—and to create better defenses against quantum attacks. According to Moody, who oversees NIST's research on post-quantum cryptography, the US has been sponsoring a contest through NIST since 2016 with the goal of producing the first quantum-computer-proof algorithms by 2024.
