Industry Today Reports: Why Cryptography Needs to Change
Skip Sanzeri / Industry Today / 18 August 2022
QuSecure is excited to share an article published in Industry Today. The article was authored by QuSecure’s COO, Skip Sanzeri. The article discusses the current state of cryptography, and how quantum computers will change the current paradigm.
Key points of the article include:
- Currently, the internet and most cybersecurity platforms use one of three encryption algorithms to protect user data: either RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman), ECC (Elliptic-Curve Cryptography), or AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). A reasonably powerful quantum computer will be able to crack RSA and ECC with algorithms that have already been discovered, and will greatly simplify cracking AES.
- Because quantum computers will destroy modern cryptographic methods, new ones must be adopted before powerful quantum computers appear on the scene, an eventuality referred to as “Q-Day”. This requires adoption of post-quantum cryptographic methods, which are new algorithms a quantum computer will be unable to break. The search for these quantum-secure algorithms is a priority in the cryptographic community.
- Recently, NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the NSA completed a search for algorithms that are resistant to quantum attacks. However, the largest challenge for organizations is that research and implementation of new cryptographic methods takes time.
- Every day, hackers and foreign nation-states perform “steal now, decrypt later” (SNDL) attacks, where they steal data and save it until it can be decoded with a quantum computer. These attacks are a very real threat, since most data remains valuable for a minimum of 10-25 years, and data stolen today could soon be decrypted with a quantum computer. This puts additional impetus on organizations to stop the bleeding by achieving quantum security as soon as possible. It is no longer a matter of if quantum computers will come online with sufficient power to crack cryptography, but when.
Read Skip’s full article on Industry Today here.
