Data Encryption Faces Enormous Risks From Quantum Computing According to IBM / Digital Information World

Protecting corporate data from malicious actors has been one of the main goals of businesses in recent years, and encryption was one of the most secure methods of protecting sensitive information. Despite the fact that this is the case, the rise of quantum computing puts encryption in jeopardy. IBM recently released a report that highlights this trend, and the findings are quite concerning.

With all of that said and now dismissed, it is important to note that malicious actors can use quantum computing protocols to decrypt data much faster than would otherwise be the case. They don’t even need to use current quantum computing. Instead, they can harvest data and wait for quantum computing to advance enough to decrypt it.

It is unclear how much data these malicious actors have harvested that could be decrypted down the line. Traditional cryptography protocols such as RSA are based on mathematics, and although they have been quite effective for a long time, they could be helpless against quantum computers with all that considered and taken into account.

Quantum computing is interesting due to the fact that it’s the kind of thing that could potentially end up brute-forcing previously unsolvable mathematical problems. This reveals that data encryption will need to be stepped up a notch, otherwise hackers will be able to decrypt the data without much trouble.

President Biden is the latest in a long line of world leaders trying to fix the problem before it spirals out of control. It is essential to act quickly, because it is very likely that decryption will increase once quantum computing becomes commonplace.

This goes to show that innovation is a double-edged sword. It can make a lot of things easier, but at the same time it can complicate other protocols that used to work perfectly well. We will have to wait and see how the tech world solves this quantum computing problem.

Photo: IBM Research/Flickr
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