It feels like 6 months ago, I couldn’t go a few hours without being exposed to some new wild claims from Microsoft or Google, or any of the other companies working on this. Lately nothing comes up in any of my feeds.
It feels like 6 months ago, I couldn’t go a few hours without being exposed to some new wild claims from Microsoft or Google, or any of the other companies working on this. Lately nothing comes up in any of my feeds.
In my mind, it was never a hype. It was something they wanted hyped but - and of course I can only speak for myself - I never was sitting on the edge of my seat. It’s the technology version of new wonder drug could cure cancer. And then you read the story and reality dwarfs the vision quite quickly. I thought blockchain was a much bigger deal hype-wise. And that had all the oxygen drawn out by so-called AI.
Quantum computing is a threat because if it became mainstream usable today it could render the entire password based login system hackable in a flash, probably breaking the internet. There are two things to consider though. It isn’t usable today. And the big companies that do a lot of the research have a vested interest in not breaking the internet. So we see passkeys today and other forms of authentication will follow before QC could become a reality - if in our lifetimes or if ever - who knows.
No, just certain specific encryption algorithms. We already have some early quantum-resistant encryption algorithms, and the internet has already started adopting them.
Oh not just passwords and logins, all kinds of cryptography, including any encryption, certification or validation based on them, would potentially become trivial. Again, it’s hard to say exactly what the outcome would be because we don’t actually have functioning quantum computers in a practical sense. But if we did, it is plausible to imagine that all practical security measures of any kind on the Internet, or anything using DRM technology, or anything wireless, ranging from top secret military and satellite communications, to industrial SCADA systems, to cellphone networks would instantly become a wide open security vulnerability with open access to anybody with such a computer.
It would almost certainly be catastrophic. A digital dark age. Everything would have to be shut down or disconnected for immediate, urgent redesign. We’d need to do almost a total reset from scratch of the entire electronic world, even the power grid itself. Even assuming we quickly develop a new quantum-resistant or quantum-powered security infrastructure, it will quite likely be vastly more limiting than our current systems and will require massive compromises in the ways we are used to designing and interacting with technology.
Quantum computers only provide a significant advantage at breaking a very specific class of asymmetric ciphers (those where the trapdoor function is either based on the discrete logarithm problem or the factorization problem) which we already have replacements for that are quantum-resistant (the trapdoor function is replaced with one based on the lattice problem). If quantum computers became a serious threat, it would not be difficult to just swap out those ciphers. The main issue would be people who have collected encrypted messages and held onto them with the hopes of cracking them in the future.