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What is the Impact of Google’s Quantum Supremacy on Cryptography?
Cryptography is the “alpha” and the “omega” for the security and the trust of billions of internet transactions in today’s hyper connected world. Driven by the cultural shift of their customers for accessing and receiving services on the go 24/7, businesses have embraced digital transformation as a means for becoming more effective and successful. The use of such technologies—such as IoT and cloud computing—has exploded the need for machine identities, which are based on the use of secure algorithms and appropriate key lengths to withstand any malicious attacks that try to disrupt the trust customers place on internet-based communications.
Is that all destined to collapse? The future of quantum computing is going to be a dramatic advancement based on the quantum mechanics principles of superposition and entanglement. All scientists say that quantum computing will cause seismic shifts in cryptography as we know it and will render all known cryptographic algorithms obsolete. Therefore, governments and organizations, such as NIST, are racing to become cryptographically quantum resilient.
Has this time come? Google’s recent announcement of achieving “quantum supremacy” has sparkled once more the debate over the impact of quantum computing in cryptography. Venafi has asked the opinion of security professionals based on this question: “How do you think Google’s claim to have broken through the quantum computing barrier will impact quantum cryptography? Will it accelerate advances in encryption or threaten them?” Let’s hear from them.
Kim Crawley, well respected information security content writer, is excited about the announcement and warns about the advancements in the field by hostile entities: “I'm very excited about Google's quantum computing announcement, even though their paper on NASA's website has been taken down. Based on what I've researched about quantum computing, it looks like we'll have quantum computers deployed in production environments under institutional administration in just a few years. I do wonder why the announcement isn't on NASA's website anymore. Maybe it wasn't strategic for Google to let their competition know about it at this stage? Anyway, NIST and IBM have been making progress developing quantum-safe cryptography. That's good because when quantum computers are deployed, they'll be able to easily crack all binary encryption. Now, will Google's new research threaten cryptographic advances? It all depends entirely on whether or not Google's tech will fall into the hands of cyber attackers. It might, and foreign cyberwarfare groups can be really clever. The important thing is that Google, IBM, NIST, and other organizations stay a step ahead of hostile entities."
