The answer lies in the creation and deployment of so-called post-quantum cryptography - encryption schemes designed to give pause to or even completely thwart future CRQCs. It is only a matter of time, however, before such systems exist. The agency's interest in quantum computing is such, even, that as a part of the document trove leaked by Edward Snowden, it was revealed that the agency invested $79.7 million in a research program titled “Penetrating Hard Targets” - which aimed to explore whether a quantum computer for actually breaking traditional encryption protocols was feasible to pursue at the time. Without effective mitigation, the impact of adversarial use of a quantum computer could be devastating to NSS and our nation, especially in cases where such information needs to be protected for many decades." National Security Systems (NSS) - systems that carry classified or otherwise sensitive military or intelligence information - use public key cryptography as a critical component to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of national security information.
And as the agency writes in its document, " (.) a CRQC would be capable of undermining the widely deployed public key algorithms used for asymmetric key exchanges and digital signatures. Naturally, an entity such as the NSA, which ensures the safety of the U.S.'s technological infrastructure, has to not only deal with present threats, but also future ones - as one might imagine, it takes an inordinate amount of time for entities as grand as an entire country's critical government systems to be updated.Īccording to the NSA, " New cryptography can take 20 years or more to be fully deployed to all National Security Systems (NSS)".
With the race for quantum computing featuring major private and state players, it's not just the expected $26 billion value of the quantum computing sphere by 2030 that worries security experts - but the possibility of quantum systems falling into the hands of rogue entities.
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While these schemes (think AES-256, more common on the consumer side, or RSA 3072-bit or larger for asymmetrical encryption algorithms) are virtually impossible to crack with current or even future supercomputers, a quantum computer doesn't play by the same rules due to the nature of the beast and the superposition states available to its computing unit, the qubit. A CRQC is the advent of a quantum-based supercomputer that is powerful enough to break current, classical-computing-designed encryption schemes.