Page 127 - Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2022 Edition

Fortunately, the U.S. government has recognized this critical issue, and is now dealing with this threat.
What they know that you don't is that adversarial nation-states are spending tens of billions of dollars,
and deploying thousands of computer scientists, PhDs and quantum programmers to build a quantum
computer that will break all the world's current encryption. These same nation-states are harvesting data
today at amazing rates via listening devices around the world in order to decrypt that data when they
have quantum capability.

Currently encryption is difficult to break with standard computers. However, via Shor's algorithm it has
been proven that quantum computers will be able to decrypt this stolen information. So by building a
powerful quantum computer, these nation-states will be able to decrypt data that may still have 25, 50 or
even 75 years of value remaining. Think in terms of military secrets, banking information, healthcare
information and other personal information that has been stolen. Much of this information needs decades
of secrecy and if decrypted, it could be used for great harm.

The fact is our government, led by our intelligence organizations and communities, knows that these
huge quantum computing investments of resources by our adversaries provide a clear and present
danger. Our government just knows more than you do. This is evidenced by the warnings that have come
out in the past eight months with increasing velocity, where the U.S. State Department and other federal
agencies have mandated quantum cyber upgrade policies. The State Department issued two separate
memos, and NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) finalized algorithm choices for
post-quantum cybersecurity (PQC) just this past July.

Then on Aug. 24, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) raised the red flag
regarding the quantum computing threat by releasing a paper providing updated advice on how any
organization with critical infrastructure and data should get ready for security risks from quantum
computers. It is now no longer a matter of if the U.S. needs to upgrade its federal agency systems to
PQC, but only a matter of when. According to the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro
Mayorkas, “The transition to post-quantum encryption algorithms is as much dependent on the
development of such algorithms as it is on their adoption. While the former is already ongoing, planning
for the latter remains in its infancy. We must prepare for it now to protect the confidentiality of data that
already exists today and remains sensitive in the future.”

All of this has been done to address the quantum threat which, based on findings from the intelligence
community, could be only a few years away. According to Britain's MI6 Chief Richard Moore, "Our
adversaries are pouring money and ambition into mastering artificial intelligence, quantum computing
and synthetic biology because they know...this will give them leverage." Governments and commercial
organizations that are responsible for securing sensitive data should not underestimate the threat of
quantum computers. The science to support quantum computing is well-founded and quantum computers
may be a single breakthrough away from cracking modern cryptography. Quantum computing is not a
question of if, but when.

Some believe that building a quantum computer powerful enough to break encryption is a decade or
more away. No one knows for sure, however nation-states are finding clever ways of stringing quantum
computers together to enable processing via an aggregate number of systems, instead of relying on a
single developed quantum computer, enabling the quantum systems to operate in a parallel fashion.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – December 2022 Edition 127
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