Industries can get ahead of quantum's future decryption potential right now

By Scott Crowder, Vice President, IBM Quantum Adoption and Business Development

Quantum computers are maturing quickly. And we see their rapid development as an important opportunity to potentially solve business problems that could revolutionize fields from medicine to finance. But this rapid development also brings risk: Future quantum computers could crack the encryption schemes that safeguard valuable data, like health records and financial data.

As we work to bring about quantum computers that deliver practical advantages over today's computers, we also must ensure that we continue to protect sensitive systems and data. One immediate concern: 'Harvest-now, hack-later' attacks — where sensitive encrypted data is stolen today for decryption using future quantum computers. This is especially critical for governments and highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and telco. In fact, 83% of organizations have experienced more than one data breach in their lifetime, according to IBM's 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report. The good news is that quantum-safe cryptography, capable of protecting this information, exists today. And government and industry are taking notice.

In May, the White House released a memorandum laying out the administration's plan for securing critical systems against potential quantum threats. In July, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced four quantum-safe algorithms for post-quantum cryptographic standardization, which they expect to finalize by 2024. Three of these algorithms were developed by IBM scientists, in collaboration with industry and academic partners. And last month, the US government issued directions on migrating to quantum-safe cryptography to its agencies.

In September, telecommunications industry organization GSMA formed a Post-Quantum Telco Network Taskforce — which IBM and Vodafone joined as initial members — to help define processes to protect telcos from this quantum future. The World Economic Forum recently estimated that more than 20 billion digital devices will need to be either upgraded or replaced in the next 10-20 years to support these new forms of quantum-safe encrypted communication.

To help speed up the understanding and prioritization of what data to protect first, IBM recently demonstrated the first Cryptography Bill of Materials. Like the Software Bill of Materials concept from software supply chains, IBM's "CBOM" simplifies the cryptography inventory assessment across software, services, and infrastructure to identify needed cryptographic components.

Moving to quantum-safe cryptography

Cryptographic standards rely on problems easy for a computer to check but hard to solve. For example, classical computers have a hard time factoring large numbers, but can easily check that two prime numbers multiply together to result in some large number. So, modern encryption methods often use large numbers as codes, such that their prime factors form a key.

However, in 1994, mathematician Peter Shor developed an algorithm that could quickly factor large prime numbers. His namesake algorithm showed a way to crack these codes with fault-tolerant quantum computers. Today's quantum computers aren't yet capable of using Shor's algorithm to factor the numbers used today, but that could change as quantum computers advance in scale, quality, and speed.

With 'quantum advantage' on the horizon, business leaders should prepare for how they could benefit. But they should also understand the risk of future fault-tolerant quantum computers, and explore quantum-safe cryptography to protect their data and systems.

We may not know exactly when it will be possible to breach today's encryption, but one thing is clear: Any data that falls into the wrong hands before an organization transitions to quantum-safe cryptography should be considered lost. And computer systems that need to operate securely without major modifications over time — like the computers in cars, or embedded in satellites — will need to be quantum-safe. Can you afford to wait?

Learn more about the importance of quantum-safe cryptography in the digital economy.

This post was created by IBM with Insider Studios.