Quantum and the Future of Cryptography.

• Author: Subramanian, Vidya
• Position: Emerging Technology Horizons

* The ability to encrypt information is an essential part of military command and control, just as breaking military codes has been a decisive factor in modern warfare. With that in mind, the United States should take steps now to prepare for a day when adversaries could have quantum computing-enabled decryption capabilities.

Examples of successful codebreaking abound, from the deciphering of the Zimmermann Telegram that brought the United States into World War I to the cracking of Japanese codes that led to victory at the Battle of Midway. Most famously, cracking the Enigma code helped change the course of World War II. Though still an essential element of military command and control, cryptography also underpins security across all segments of our economy, including phone calls, credit card payments, banking transactions and most web searches.

Ensuring that data is successfully encrypted and thus inaccessible to attackers is key to maintaining a strong cyber defense posture. To that end, cryptographic technologies are widely employed to authenticate sources, protect stored information, and share data in a confidential and secure manner. Algorithms currently in use are so advanced and have revolutionized data security to such an extent that even the fastest classical computers could take years, in some cases decades, to unlock encrypted files. As a result, rather than attempt brute force decryption, hackers have instead preferred to steal encryption keys or find weak links in a security network to bypass secure channels and steal decrypted data.

For example, in the recent Colonial Pipeline incident, attackers obtained access to the IT system through a legacy Virtual Private Network, or VPN, profile that had not been used or monitored for years. Better enforcement of cyber hygiene is a short-term solution, but in the long-term, security networks must also be overhauled to implement cryptographic algorithms designed to fend off future attacks made possible with emerging technologies such as quantum computing.

For decades now, quantum computing has been hailed as one of the next big revolutions. Quantum computing is not just faster than traditional computing methods, but a fundamentally different approach to solve seemingly intractable problems. The mathematical operations that most traditional cryptographic algorithms rely on could be cracked with a sufficiently strong quantum computer.

With the potential that quantum could have on the...