After multiple rounds of testing, both inside the organisation and at the hands of external cryptographers, NIST announced its approval in July of four algorithms it believes are quantum-safe for the purposes of encryption and digital signatures, with another four placed ‘under consideration’. “We wanted to make sure we have standards ready as soon as possible, even though a quantum computer is still off in the future,” says Moody. It’s the reason why Moody and his colleagues at NIST have been holding a competition since 2016 to source new standards for encryption algorithms that, in theory, should be able to withstand the codebreaking abilities of mature quantum computers. “It could be that it’s happening behind the scenes and we don’t know it for a while,” says the mathematician and expert in all things quantum at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST.) According to mathematicians like Dustin Moody, however, we may not even know the precise moment when conventional encryption is cracked.
Some predict it’ll take as little as eight years before conventional cryptography will be broken by a quantum computer, while others insist we still have a few decades before any quantum advantage well and truly breaks the internet. This moment is often referred to by cryptographers as ‘Q-Day,’ though when it’ll arrive is anyone’s guess. Machines capable of harnessing the mysteries of quantum mechanics to achieve feats of computation vastly superior to its silicon-based antecedents, the announcement that a quantum computer had broken RSA, DES or AES would render vast swathes of the internet insecure overnight. Quantum computers, meanwhile, will make short shrift of these conundrums. Mathematical riddles shared between two nodes in a network, modern encryption techniques would take trillions of years for your everyday ‘classical’ computer to crack. The future of privacy online begins and ends with the demise of public key cryptography.
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