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They call it Q-Day: the day when a quantum computer, one more powerful than any yet built, could shatter the world of privacy and security as we know it.
It would happen through a bravura act of mathematics: the separation of some very large numbers, hundreds of digits long, into their prime factors.
That might sound like a meaningless division problem, but it would fundamentally undermine the encryption protocols that governments and corporations have relied on for decades. Sensitive information such as military intelligence, weapons designs, industry secrets, and banking information is often transmitted or stored under digital locks that the act of factoring large numbers could crack open.
Among the various threats to America’s national security, the unraveling of encryption is rarely discussed in the same terms as nuclear proliferation, the global climate crisis, or artificial general intelligence. But for many of those working on the problem behind the scenes, the danger is existential.
“This is potentially a completely different kind of problem than one we’ve ever faced,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and one of the authors of an expert consensus report on cryptology. “It may be that there’s only a 1 percent chance of that happening, but a 1 percent chance of something catastrophic is something you need to worry about.”
The White House and the Homeland Security Department have made clear that in the wrong hands, a powerful quantum computer could disrupt everything from secure communications to the underpinnings of our financial system. In short order, credit card transactions and stock exchanges could be overrun by fraudsters; air traffic systems and GPS signals could be manipulated; and the security of critical infrastructure, like nuclear plants and the power grid, could be compromised.
The danger extends not just to future breaches but to past ones: Troves of encrypted data harvested now and in coming years could, after Q-Day, be unlocked. Current and former intelligence officials say that China and potentially other rivals are most likely already working to find and store such troves of data in hopes of decoding them in the future. European policy researchers echoed those concerns in a report this summer.
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Illustration by Ben Wiseman
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