Raksha Anirveda
Security Futurism
Dark Side of Quantum Computers - A Lurking Threat to National Security
Armos uses Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) to provide unconditional protection to data while it is at its most vulnerable–in motion. Using the principles of quantum physics, Armos secures the distribution of symmetric encryption keys
Quantum computing has long promised the next major leap forward in computing power. However, there is a darker side of it having the potential to undermine the foundations of internet privacy and commerce By Sunil Gupta
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ryptosystems are designed to cope with the worst case scenarios: an adversary with infinite computing resources can get access to plaintext/ ciphertext pairs (and thus could study the relationship between each pair) and knows the encryption and decryption algorithms; so can choose plaintext or ciphertext values at will. The only element not accessible to this adversary is the secret key; thus the security of a cryptosystem depends solely on the security of the key. This is a long-standing design philosophy first enunciated by Auguste Kerckhoff in 1883 which states: “The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the cryptoalgorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key.” Today’s encryption (secret) keys are highly vulnerable due to many reasons such as weak randomness, advances to CPU power, new attack strategies, emergence of new algorithms such as Shor’s, which when run on quantum computers
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will ultimately render much of today’s encryption unsafe. Some of the recent news and disclosures has shown the stark reality and the ugly face of data security. l Snowden disclosed in 2013 that Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British agency, has been copying 20 petabytes of data every day off optical fibers around the world under a secret project “Tempora” and had been giving the encrypted data to National Security Agency (NSA). l A Reuters report in 2013 mentioned that NSA paid $10 million to put its backdoor in RSA encryption such that, the
programme had a random number generator, but there were a number of fixed, constant numbers built into the algorithm that could function as a kind of skeleton key. Anyone who knows the right numbers can decipher the resulting crypto text. l Another recent news with an interesting title, ‘The intelligence coup of the “century” shook the world. As per this news, for decades, the CIA and the West German intelligence have been reading the encrypted communications of over 60+ countries, including allies and adversaries for decades. There are also echoes of crypto in the suspicions swirling around modern companies with alleged links to foreign governments. While the bright side of powerful QCs will help solve a lot of problems for humanity and will give a huge boost to discovery of drugs, new materials and space
