As the field of quantum computing advances, new opportunities and threats are emerging. One key threat federal leaders are focusing on is decryption.
“It’s all about decryption. It’s all about cracking your secrets,” said Dr. Ken Urquhart, global vice president of 5G strategy at Zscaler, in a recent video interview with Executive Mosaic’s Summer Myatt.
But right now, Dr. Urquhart said we’re not quite at the stage of being able to crack quantum encryption.
“So let’s look at where we are today — we don’t have enough qubits to do really interesting things with most of the algorithms. To crack RSA encryption, we had one group say about 6,000 qubits. Are we there yet? No — we may hit about 1,000 this year and now we’re going to go for 4,000. Still not at 6,000 qubits,” he shared.
Dr. Urquhart said that based on estimates from physicists and quantum experts, we may not achieve full-scale quantum computing capabilities for another 50 years. But despite this, those in the quantum field are still working to find new algorithms that are stronger and less likely to be cracked using quantum or classical computing.
“Turns out you can build encryption algorithms for quantum computing that are just as hard to break as encryption algorithms in classical computing,” he said. “In fact, there was one algorithm for quantum encryption that would be considered unbreakable on a quantum computer that turned out you could break on a classical computer pretty quickly.”
Watch Dr. Urquhart’s full video interview here to learn more about quantum effects and when they may start to impact our world.