philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Race to Save Our Secrets From the Computers of the Future

They call it Q-Day: the day when a quantum computer, one more powerful than any yet built, could shatter the world of privacy and security as we know it. ...

...it would fundamentally undermine the encryption protocols that governments and corporations have relied on for decades. ...

Today, the most powerful quantum device uses 433 “qubits,” as the quantum equivalent of transistors are called. That figure would probably need to reach into the tens of thousands, perhaps even the millions, before today’s encryption systems would fall. ...

But within the U.S. cybersecurity community, the threat is seen as real and urgent. China, Russia and the United States are all racing to develop the technology before their geopolitical rivals do, though it is difficult to know who is ahead because some of the gains are shrouded in secrecy. ...

On the American side, the possibility that an adversary could win that race has set in motion a yearslong effort to develop a new generation of encryption systems, ones that even a powerful quantum computer would be unable to break. ...

Judging in part by past migrations, officials estimated that even after settling on a new generation of algorithms, it could take another 10 to 15 years to implement them widely. ...

Many of the most promising submissions are built on lattices, a mathematical concept involving grids of points in various repeating shapes, like squares or hexagons, but projected into dimensions far beyond what humans can visualize. As the number of dimensions increases, problems such as finding the shortest distance between two given points grow exponentially harder, overcoming even a quantum computer’s computational strengths. ...

 The size of American companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, with their control over large swaths of internet traffic, also means that a few players could get large parts of the transition done relatively nimbly. ...

But strategists caution that the way an adversary might behaveafter achieving a major breakthrough makes the threat unlike any the defense community has faced. Seizing on advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, a rival country may keep its advances secret rather than demonstrating them, to quietly break into as many troves of data as possible. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/us/politics/quantum-computing-encryption.html