Celebrity gossip might break the Internet, but not in the way that quantum computers could. “The advent of quantum computers poses a critical threat, as they could break widely deployed encryption schemes,” warns Lily Chen, a cryptography expert from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Systems at risk include banking encryption, digital signatures, secure messaging, secure shell tunnelling, cryptocurrency and more.
Today’s quantum computers are still too small and error-prone to defeat gold-standard encryption. However, new results from Google Quantum AI and start-up Oratomic suggest that could change, with two widely-used cryptographic systems – elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm – potentially coming under threat sooner than many scientists predicted.
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