In my previous blog post, you could read about classical cryptography and a fraction of the vast amount of use cases for quantum computers. In addition, we established that quantum computers make use of two particular phenomena: superposition and entanglement. In this blog post, you can read about why quantum cryptography is already a use case today for some organizations.
A classical computer will take longer than the current age of the universe to crack RSA-encryption, whereas a quantum computer will be capable to crack RSA-encryption in just seconds.
Harvesting the quantum world
As a result of the quantum behavior, quantum computers can calculate solutions to hard problems exponentially faster than all the computers that exist in the world today combined (including the most powerful supercomputers). Imagine the potential as follows. When you are computing the fastest route in a maze, a classical computer would have to decide at every junction to go one way or the other. This can be represented as going left (0) or right (1). A quantum computer, however, would not have to decide on one way: it just follows every path there can be at the same time by making use of superposition and entanglement. This can be represented as going left (0) and right (1). This allows for its exponential improvement in performance over classical computed bits.
Quantum Cryptography
Now, regarding cryptography, a classical computer will take longer than the current age of the universe to crack RSA-encryption (300 trillion years), whereas a quantum computer will be capable to crack RSA-encryption in just 10 seconds. That’s just the power of nature right there. So, do you have to be afraid right now? Not yet. At least, if you don’t care about the data you have today in 10 years. Quantum computers that can crack RSA-encryption will not exist for a while, but there are a couple of companies and governments that have to hurry right now. Imagine that you are able to steal information from a company or government today. Then you are probably not able to decrypt it right now. However, if you hold it on for 10 years, then a quantum computer can decrypt it fairly easily. This is only useful if the data is still relevant in 10 years. So, companies and governments that have such sensitive, time-invariant data that cannot be made public have to become resistant against quantum computing right now! Therefore, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is bringing together bright minds to come up with new encryption algorithms that are quantum resistant. But this takes time. And until then, sensitive, time-invariant data is at risk.
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