Will These Algorithms Save You From Quantum Threats?

In 1994, a Bell Labs mathematician named Peter Shor cooked up an algorithm with frightening potential. Fortunately for the thousands of email providers, websites, and other secure services using factor-based encryption methods such as RSA or elliptic curve cryptography, the computer needed to run Shor’s algorithm didn’t exist yet. Shor wrote it to run on quantum computers which, back in the mid-1990s, were largely theoretical devices that scientists hoped might one day outperform classical computers on a subset of complex problems. In the decades since, huge strides have been made toward building practical quantum computers, and government and private researchers have been racing to develop new quantum-proof algorithms that will be resistant to the power of these new machines. “We need to have new algorithms to replace the ones that are vulnerable, and the first step is to standardize them.” Just as RSA encryption relies on the difficulty of factoring extremely large numbers, three of the four algorithms unveiled this week use a complicated mathematical problem that’s expected to be difficult for even quantum computers to wrestle with.