Turning Hard Problems into Post-quantum Solutions
By Gretchen L. Matthews
The key to safe encrypted information will be finding what’s difficult for both current and future computers to solve.
This Article From Issue
March-April 2024
Volume 112, Number 2
Page 82
When I was a kid, before the days of home computers, my dad gave me large multiplication and division problems to keep me busy. As I got faster, he increased the numbers of digits so that the challenge would occupy roughly the same amount of time. However, it would have been a lot more difficult for him to keep me busy for 15 minutes or so if we’d had a computer; the arithmetic problems, painstakingly executed in my notebook, could have been calculated almost instantaneously by a computer, no matter how long those numbers got. The gulf between five-year-old me and a home computer is as inherently unbridgeable as the difference between a classical computer and a quantum machine, a gap with serious implications for the complex problems that underpin the modern-day cryptography that secures our digital worlds.
QUICK TAKE
- Current cybersecurity is largely based on cryptography that utilizes the fact that classical computers take extensive time to solve certain difficult mathematical problems.
- That could change with the rollout of fully realized quantum computers, which can solve certain problems much faster, and could therefore crack current cryptography easily.
- The trick is for cryptographers to hone in on mathematical problems that are difficult for both classical computers and quantum computers to solve, so keys are unbreakable by either.
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