'No matter what password you use, I will break it in a fraction of a second', one of Israel's cyber pioneers on what quantum computing actually does to encryption

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Prof. Maj.-Gen. (res.) Isaac Ben-Israel, one of the founding architects of Israel's modern cybersecurity apparatus and former head of the Israel Space Agency, told the Jerusalem Post Podcast that quantum computing will eventually wipe out today's encryption entirely, describing what a mature quantum computer would do to the passwords protecting banks, governments and militaries in blunt terms, no matter what password you use, in a fraction of a second I will break it. The scale of the speed gap he described isn't merely 100 or 1,000 times faster than a classical computer, he put it closer to 10 to the 20th or 30th power, a number he noted we all know how to write down and none of us can really picture

Ben-Israel drew a sharp distinction between two separate areas of quantum research advancing right now, quantum computing and quantum communication. Quantum computing doesn't make hackers better at breaking into a system, it destroys the encryption protecting whatever they find once they're already inside, turning brute force password cracking from an impossibly slow process into something trivial. The fix, he said, comes in two forms, first new post-quantum mathematics that even a quantum machine can't crack in reasonable time, though the algorithms that exist today remain slow and unready for wide adoption, with roughly a 10-year lag expected before industry fully migrates to them

The second and stranger fix, in his view where the world eventually lands, is quantum entanglement itself, since something done on one quantum computer can register on another arbitrarily far away with nothing physically traveling in between, no wire, no signal, nothing to intercept and no password to steal. China has already put a satellite in orbit using exactly this kind of entanglement based communication, and Tel Aviv University students launched a satellite two years ago as an early step toward the same capability. Ben-Israel estimated roughly ten years to solve the main remaining obstacle, interference between quantum elements that gets worse as more are added, but was careful to temper expectations about availability, these will be enormous, ultracold machines drawing enormous amounts of electricity, there will be no more than a few in the world, and a quantum computer in every home is more than 50 years away, if ever

'No matter what password you use, I will break it in a fraction of a second' | The Jerusalem Postwww.jpost.com