The Race Is On to Fight a Cyber Threat That Doesn’t Exist
The cybersecurity community was set alight last week by the announcement of new cryptographic algorithms designed to protect our digital futures. Now the race us on to roll out software and hardware that will secure computers against a threat that still only exists in theory.
After a six-year search, the US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology on July 5 announced it had found four algorithms “that are designed to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer” that will be included in its set of official standards. Another four remain under consideration and may be included in the list later. The final standards, which will include parameters and implementations of the algorithms, will be finalized over the next two years.
An algorithm is a mathematical recipe for taking one set of information and converting it into another form. In cryptography, such algorithms are deployed to make messages hard to read by an external party, or to verify the legitimacy of data such as a signature or password. Many of those examined by NIST have been around for decades, meaning there’s plenty of time for researchers to break the algorithms — some were shown to be insecure during the selection process.
It’s a common misunderstanding that secure cryptography is impossible to break. Instead, computer scientists use the term infeasible — meaning an encrypted message can be reverse engineered, in theory, but it would take an extremely long time to do so.
Current security approaches hold because modern computers use binary units — bits — to reduce all numbers to 1s and 0s, and then perform calculations. But quantum computers can function on more than two binary bits at a time (they’re known as qubits), meaning
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