Cybersecurity: “Critical data of companies and administrations will no longer be a secret to those who master quantum computing”

VSDeveloping cybersecurity tools that can withstand future quantum computers, i.e., the migration to post-quantum cryptography as soon as possible, while maintaining the same resistance to attacks that can be carried out by current conventional computers, is a major challenge. companies today.

It makes no sense to believe that corporate data will not be leaked. It is also useless to use the conditional when talking about the post-quantum threat, because we are sure that such computers will exist in the next few years, and the probability of seeing them increases faster than expected every day. In November 2021, IBM already announced that it had created a 127-qubit quantum processor (power unit) and even dreamed of a 1000-qubit quantum chip in 2023!

What are the cyber security risks for companies? A little history is needed to understand. In 1994, the American computer scientist Peter Shore showed that quantum computers could convert thousands or millions of digits into two prime numbers in minutes, when it would take our current computers millions of years to factor a number by six hundred. numbers.

Ten thousand years with a classic computer

Closer to home, Google developed a quantum computer and presented it with a complex computational operation that would take a classical computer about ten thousand years to solve. But Sycamore—the name of Google’s 54-qubit processor—could solve it in just two hundred seconds.

Without detailing what the security of most information systems today is based on, we can simplify that it is based on two mathematical problems that cannot be solved in a reasonable amount of time, given the computer resources and existing mathematical knowledge.

And this is a ruble. Both of these fundamental problems will clearly be within the reach of a large quantum computer to solve, which will undoubtedly lead to the collapse of the security of currently deployed cryptography.

In short, all the critical data of companies and administrations will no longer be a secret to those who have mastered quantum computing. It also means that stolen data, which today cannot be decrypted because it would take centuries, can be easily decrypted in just a few minutes…