President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum (NSM) on Thursday calling for government agencies to implement measures to mitigate risks posed by guantum computers to US national cyber security.
The NSM highlights the dangers of cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers (CRQC), including their potential ability to brake public-key cryptography.
Immediate risks include:
Endangering civilian and military communications.
Undermining supervisory and control systems for critical infrastructure.
Defeating security protocols for the vast majority of Internet-based financial transactions.
Jamie Boote, software security consultant at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, explains why quantum computers pose such a threat:
“While it can take unrealistically long times for traditional computers to attack currently recommended encryption algorithms, quantum computers are expected to be able to break such encryption in trivial amounts of time. This means that when quantum computing leaves the lab, all currently encrypted data will be vulnerable to confidentiality breaches. This is another step on the march of progress. In my career, I have seen MD5 hashing go from recommended to obsolete due to advances in computing. The same is true for sha-1. I’ve also seen SSL 1-3 and several TLS versions become obsolete due to exploitable or potentially exploitable weaknesses which prevent their ..
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