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QUANTUM COMPUTING: WILL IT BREAK CRYPTO SECURITY WITHIN A FEW YEARS?

Current cryptographic security methods watch out - quantum computing is coming
for your lunch.

Cameron Camp

01 Aug 2023  •  , 3 min. read



If the rapid pace at which groups like Google are spooling up amped-up quantum
computers continues, so too drops the shot clock to fix or replace cryptographic
algorithms used to secure just about everything before they become quite
crackable. The reason: The fundamental structure of computing – the bit – gets
revamped to contain massive amounts of data each in a thing called qubit (short
for ‘quantum bit’). After claiming quantum supremacy back in 2019, Google
Quantum AI has now built the second generation of a computer that can digest and
process an insane amount of them in record time, allowing them to hammer away at
authentication until it breaks.

And this is just the beginning.

Quantum computing is a famously quirky – but promising – technology, highly
susceptible to tricky noise problems that have bedeviled the tech, which tend to
cause them to go berserk. But get them quiet enough to be maximally useable, and
you fundamentally change computing power, by orders of magnitude.

To do that, a new system of minimizing noise and still getting usable
information processed utilizes a scheme called random circuit sampling (RCS),
which allows 70-qubit processing, vs. the last generation’s 53-qubit on the
Sycamore quantum processor. That’s a HUGE difference in processing power. There
are substantial efforts to push toward even higher qubit processing if the tech
can either make quantum less noisy, optimize its performance amidst increased
noise, or, most likely, both.

Even with the current level of computing power, however, the team estimates, “we
conclude that our demonstration is firmly in the regime of beyond-classical
quantum computation.” Basically, that means whatever supercomputers the world is
using now will rapidly become dinosaurs, somewhat akin to condensing the
computing power of yesterday’s mainframe into a smartphone you probably have
sitting in your pocket. And it’s not just the scale of the computing speed:
quantum computing is by nature massively parallel, with qubits able to
effectively compute many things at the same time.

Source: Google AI Blog

Looking like the set of a sci-fi movie, the latest entrant by Google’s team is
setting compelling speed records and promises more. It kind of also looks like a
birthing facility for machine battery drones of the future, but so far none of
that.

That means the cryptography we use every day that makes up the authentication we
use for – everything – to make authentication too tricky to guess or reverse
engineer just got more reverse engineerable. Current cryptographic tokens in
wide use base their security breakability on whether current practical computing
platforms could iterate through enough combinations to guess the right
combination to crack the lock within some practical timeframe. Even using modern
supercomputers with modern cryptography in wide use, guessing the right
combination could take years, possibly many years.
But what modern supercomputers can guess in many years, the second generation of
Sycamore processor using RCS can guess in seconds or minutes, meaning it can
conceivably break current “classical computer” security algorithms.

What will we use next for encryption? There is a field of study using quantum
computing to generate these far more complex computations that would be more
difficult to guess. This partially due to increasing the current practical
limitations of what is considered a “random number” by classical computing,
which then becomes the seed for far more secure algorithms used in cryptography.
Even then, when the new quantum “killer app” happens, it will take years to roll
out. That favors the attacker.

Even if it did roll out quickly, it is very unlikely that the swarms of security
gadgets out there (think routing hardware for the whole internet, or
government-level cryptographic token tech) will be initially able to adopt the
new schemas without significant hardware upgrades.

Not that the bad actors will run out and build a quantum supercomputer – they’re
huge and expensive – but the usual nation-state suspects are most certainly
interested in placing an order.

Quantum computing also promises to rapidly accelerate AI/ML engines in ways
difficult to conceptualize. Add to this solving amazingly complex problems like
weather modeling, or making sense of giant piles of data that seem daunting,
like finding complex threats, and you can see the allure.

Meanwhile, we’re still trying to get folks to adopt multi-factor authentication,
so the security basics still apply, and will for some time into the future. But
a quantum computing platform will be in your future. Maybe, one day it will be
in your pocket as an iPhone 73.

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