Modern public-key encryption is currently good enough to meet enterprise requirements, according to experts. Most cyberattacks target different parts of the security stack these days – unwary users in particular. Yet this stalwart building block of present-day computing is about to be eroded by the advent of quantum computing within the next decade, according to experts.
“About 99% of online encryption is vulnerable to quantum computers,” said Mark Jackson, scientific lead for Cambridge Quantum Computing, at the Inside Quantum Technology conference in Boston on Wednesday.
Quantum computers – those that use the principles of quantum entanglement and superposition to represent information, instead of electrical bits – are capable of performing certain types of calculation orders of magnitude more quickly than classical, electronic computers. They’re more or less fringe technology in 2019, but their development has accelerated in recent years, and experts at the IQT conference say that a spike in deployment could occur as soon as 2024.
