Computer of the future: the race to save secrets – 10/22/2023 – Market

They call it Q-Day: the day when a quantum computer, more powerful than any ever built, could destroy the world of privacy and security as we know it.

This would happen through an impressive act of mathematics: the separation of very large numbers, with hundreds of digits, into their prime factors.

This may seem like a pointless divisive problem, but it would fundamentally undermine the encryption protocols that governments and businesses have relied on for decades.

Sensitive information, such as military intelligence, weapons designs, industry secrets and banking information, is often transmitted or stored under digital keys that factoring large numbers could open.

Among the many threats to U.S. national security, cracking cryptography is rarely discussed in the same terms as nuclear proliferation, the global climate crisis, or artificial general intelligence.

But for many of those working behind the scenes, the danger exists.

“This is potentially a completely different kind of problem than we’ve ever faced,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, former general counsel at the National Security Agency and one of the authors of an expert consensus report on cryptology.

“There may only be a 1% chance of this happening, but a 1% chance of something catastrophic is something you need to worry about.”

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security have made it clear that, in the wrong hands, a powerful quantum computer could disrupt everything from secure communications to the foundations of our financial system.

In a short time, credit card transactions and stock exchanges could be invaded by fraudsters; air traffic systems and GPS signals could be manipulated; and the security of critical infrastructure, such as nuclear plants and the electrical grid, could be compromised.

The danger extends not just to future breaches, but also to past breaches: Troves of encrypted data collected now and in the coming years could, after Q-Day, be unlocked.

Current and former intelligence officials say China and potentially other rivals are likely already working to find and store these troves of data in hopes of deciphering them in the future. European policy researchers echoed these concerns in a report this summer.

No one knows when, if ever, quantum computing will advance to this point. Today, the most powerful quantum device uses 433 “qubits,” as the quantum equivalents of transistors are called.

This figure would likely need to reach the tens of thousands, perhaps even the millions, before current encryption systems would be broken.

But within the U.S. cybersecurity community, the threat is seen as real and urgent.

China, Russia and the United States are all racing to develop the technology before their geopolitical rivals do, although it is difficult to know who is ahead because some of the advances are shrouded in secrecy.

On the American side, the possibility that an adversary could win this race kicked off a multi-year effort to develop a new generation of encryption systems, ones that not even a powerful quantum computer would be able to break.

The effort, which began in 2016, will culminate early next year, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology is expected to finalize its guidance for migrating to the new systems.

Prior to this migration, President Joe Biden late last year signed the Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Readiness Act, which directed agencies to begin scanning their systems for encryption that will need to be replaced.

But even with this new urgency, the move to stronger encryption will likely take a decade or more — a pace that, some experts fear, may not be fast enough to avoid catastrophe.

Ahead of the clock

Researchers have known since the 1990s that quantum computing — which relies on the properties of subatomic particles to perform multiple calculations at the same time — could one day threaten the encryption systems in use today.

In 1994, American mathematician Peter Shor showed how this could be done, publishing an algorithm that a then-hypothetical quantum computer could use to divide exceptionally large numbers into factors quickly — a task at which conventional computers are notoriously inefficient.

This weakness of conventional computers is the foundation upon which much of today’s cryptography is founded.

Even today, factoring one of the large numbers used by RSA, one of the most common forms of factor-based encryption, would take trillions of years to accomplish by the most powerful conventional computers.

Shor’s algorithm initially arrived as little more than a disturbing curiosity. Much of the world was already moving to adopt precisely the encryption methods that Shor had proven to be vulnerable.

The first quantum computer, which was several orders of magnitude too weak to run the algorithm efficiently, would not be built for another four years.

But quantum computing has been progressing rapidly. In recent years, IBM, Google and others have demonstrated steady advances in building larger, more capable models, leading experts to conclude that scaling up is not just theoretically possible, but achievable with some crucial technical advances.

“If quantum physics works as we hope, that’s an engineering problem,” said Scott Aaronson, director of the Center for Quantum Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Quantum computing is expected to bring radical benefits to areas such as chemistry, materials science and artificial intelligence.

Future devices could simulate complex chemical reactions, accelerating the discovery of new medicines and materials that could result in longer-lasting batteries for electric vehicles or sustainable plastic alternatives.

Last year, quantum technology startups received $2.35 billion in private investment, according to an analysis by consulting firm McKinsey, which also projected that the technology could create $1.3 trillion in value within these areas by 2035.

Cybersecurity experts have been warning for some time that deep-pocketed rivals like China and Russia—among the few adversaries with both scientific talent and the billions of dollars needed to build a formidable quantum computer—are likely advancing quantum science partly in secret. .

Despite several achievements by American scientists, analysts insist that the nation is at risk of being left behind — a fear reiterated this month in a report from the Center for Data Innovation, an institution focused on technology policy.

Too close

Scientists at Nist (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have maintained encryption standards since the 1970s, when the agency studied and published the first general cipher to protect information used by civilian agencies and contractors, the Data Encryption Standard.

As encryption needs have evolved, Nist has regularly collaborated with military agencies to develop new standards that guide technology companies and IT departments around the world.

During the 2010s, officials at Nist and other agencies became convinced that the likelihood of a substantial leap in quantum computing within a decade — and the risk it would pose to the nation’s encryption standards — had become too high to bear. be prudently ignored.

“Our guys were doing the fundamental work that said, hey, this is getting too close for us to stay calm,” said Richard H. Ledgett Jr., former deputy director of the National Security Agency.

The sense of urgency was increased by the awareness of how difficult and time-consuming implementing the new standards would be.

Based on previous migrations, officials estimated that even after choosing a new generation of algorithms, it could take another 10 to 15 years to implement them widely.

This is not just because all actors, from technology giants to small software providers, must integrate the new standards over time.

Some encryption also exists in hardware, where it may be difficult or impossible to modify, for example in cars and ATMs.

Dustin Moody, a mathematician at Nist, notes that even satellites in space can be affected. “You launch this satellite, this hardware is in there, you’re not going to be able to replace it,” Dr. Moody noted.

Defending open source

According to Nist, the federal government has set an overall goal of migrating as many as possible to these new quantum-resistant algorithms by 2035, which many officials recognize as ambitious.

These algorithms are not the product of a Manhattan Project-like initiative or a commercial effort led by one or more technology companies. Rather, they emerged through years of collaboration within a diverse, international community of cryptographers.

Following its worldwide call in 2016, Nist received 82 proposals, most of which were developed by small teams of academics and engineers.

As it has done in the past, the institute relies on a set of guidelines in which it solicits new solutions and then makes them available to government and private sector researchers to be challenged and analyzed for weaknesses.

“This was done in an open way so that academic cryptographers, the people who are innovating ways to break encryption, have had an opportunity to weigh in on what’s strong and what’s not,” said Steven B. Lipner, executive director from SafeCode, a non-profit organization focused on software security.

Many of the most promising proposals are based on lattices, a mathematical concept that involves grids of dots in various repetitive shapes, such as squares or hexagons, but projected into dimensions far beyond what humans can visualize.

As the number of dimensions increases, problems such as finding the shortest distance between two given points become exponentially more difficult, surpassing even the computational capabilities of a quantum computer.

NIST ended up selecting four algorithms to recommend for broader use.

Despite the serious challenges of transitioning to these new algorithms, the United States has benefited from the experience of previous migrations, such as the one that addressed the so-called Y2K bug and previous moves to new encryption standards.

The size of US companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, with their control over large parts of internet traffic, also means that some players can complete large parts of the transition relatively quickly.

“You actually get a very large fraction of all the traffic being upgraded to the new encryption easily, so you can get these very large chunks all at once,” said Chris Peikert, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

But strategists warn that the way an adversary might behave after achieving a major breakthrough makes the threat unlike any other faced by the defense community.

By taking advantage of advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, a rival country can keep its advances secret rather than demonstrate them, to silently hack into as many data treasures as possible.

Especially as storage has become much cheaper, cybersecurity experts say the main challenge now for the United States’ adversaries is not storing vast amounts of data, but rather making informed guesses about what they are collecting.

“Combine this with advances in cyberattack and artificial intelligence,” said Mr. Gerstell, “and you have a potentially existential weapon for which we have no specific deterrent.”