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The Quantum Spectre at the Banquet
Quantum is tipped to be the next big thing in computers, and it has been for some time – in fact it was first conceived in the 1980s; however the issue was not really considered until the mid-1990s. Now, it’s seen as a potential game changer in the world of cryptography, where the world’s secrets will be laid bare and the privacy will be compromised unless we can develop post-quantum cryptography.
Unlike present day computers, which use bits (1s and 0s – basically on and off) for representing states, quantum computers use qubits (these can be both 1 and 0 simultaneously – a state known as superposition) which are considerably more efficient and permit the computer to conduct complex parallel calculations faster than traditional computers, exponentially faster. In theory, a calculation that would take a present-day computer millions of years to find, a quantum computer could do in minutes.
The technology though has a few issues, for one, qubits are extremely fragile, environmental factors can interfere with them, and as a result they need specialised architecture and error correction to compensate, and for the technology to actually threaten cryptography as it currently exists, it will need considerably more qubits than we currently are capable of building into our architectures. The most qubits we can currently create in a stable architecture is about 1000, whilst NIST theorises that in order to properly threaten cryptography potentially millions of qubits would be needed and they would need to operate in a near error free state – something we are nowhere near close to reaching.
This does not mean we should be complacent; we also need to be practical. The cost and technology for a threat actor to build a practical quantum computer is still some significant time away, and when we start to reach that threshold, it will likely lie in the space of militaries and governments seeking to gain strategic advantages over their rivals. In practical cybersecurity terms quantum is viewed as a theoretical threat that may well eventually manifest, but it’s a next decade problem in a present-day world of patching and data hygiene issues. Whilst it is right we should be mindful and challenge vendors to consider how they will address quantum; we also need to avoid doom mongering and hype by staying focussed on the issues that we currently have rather than focus on possible problems in a decade.