For roughly three decades, experts in digital cryptography have been monitoring a distant threat that a powerful enough quantum computer could render the most widely used forms of encryption obsolete. NIST is unveiling three new algorithms designed to counteract this threat, aiming to protect national security secrets and personal banking records.
Traditional encryption methods rely on difficult mathematical problems like factoring large numbers. RSA, elliptic curve cryptography, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange are widely used but could be compromised by a quantum computer. Mathematician Peter Shor's 1994 paper showed how quantum computing could break these schemes in a matter of hours.
While current technology would take billions of years to crack the latest RSA standard, a theoretical quantum computer could achieve this in hours. The threat to internet security is substantial, as 90% of connections start with RSA to establish security. AES, the symmetric-key algorithm used by the U.S. government, may face a different quantum attack but can be protected with simple changes.
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