Try not to panic, but quantum computers stand poised to upend today’s information technology infrastructure. These revolutionary machines, though likely at least a decade off, could handily crack the encryption codes that protect everything from email to online shopping and banking, even classified government documents.
“With quantum computers, there is a real danger that the encryption algorithms we use today may be compromised,” says quantum physicist Andrew Shields of Toshiba. It’s one of many large companies investing in quantum computer-related initiatives — not just quantum computers, but also quantum encryption and networks. “If that does happen, the consequences could be very bad indeed.”
Online security today chiefly relies on two encryption schemes: RSA (named for its developers), based on factoring the product of two big prime numbers, and ECC (elliptic curve cryptography), rooted in the algebraic structure of points on a curve. These two methods create public keys and related private keys that encrypt data and create digital signatures (so your computer knows it really is Microsoft or McAfee sending you a software update).
