The encryption guarding digital communications could someday be cracked by quantum computers. Dubbed ‘Q-day,’ that moment could upend military and economic security worldwide. Great powers are sprinting to get there first.
In February, a Canadian cybersecurity firm delivered an ominous forecast to the U.S. Department of Defense. America’s secrets – actually, everybody’s secrets – are now at risk of exposure, warned the team from Quantum Defen5e (QD5).
QD5’s executive vice president, Tilo Kunz, told officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency that possibly as soon as 2025, the world would arrive at what has been dubbed “Q-day,” the day when quantum computers make current encryption methods useless. Machines vastly more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers would be capable of cracking the codes that protect virtually all modern communication, he told the agency, which is tasked with safeguarding the U.S. military’s communications.
In the meantime, Kunz told the panel, a global effort to plunder data is underway so that intercepted messages can be decoded after Q-day in what he described as “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, according to a recording of the session the agency later made public.
Militaries would see their long-term plans and intelligence gathering exposed to enemies. Businesses could have their intellectual property swiped. People’s health records would be laid bare.
“We are not the only ones who are harvesting, we are not the only ones hoping to decrypt that in the future,” Kunz said, without naming names. “Everything that gets sent over public networks is at risk.”
Kunz is among a growing chorus sounding this alarm. Many cyber experts believe all the major powers are collecting ahead of Q-day. The United States and China, the world’s leading military powers, are accusing each other of data harvesting on a grand scale.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray, said in September that China had “a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined.” In a September report, China’s chief civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, accused the U.S. National Security Agency of “systematic” attacks to steal Chinese data.
The National Security Agency declined to comment on China’s accusation.
More is at stake than cracking codes. Quantum computers, which harness the mysterious properties of subatomic particles, promise to deliver breakthroughs in science, armaments, and industry, researchers say.
Opinion is divided on the expected arrival of Q-day, to be sure. It’s still relatively early days for quantum computing: So far, only small quantum computers with limited processing power and a vulnerability to error have been built. Some researchers estimate that Q-day might come closer to the middle of the century.
No one knows who might get there first. The United States and China are considered the leaders in the field; many experts believe America still holds an edge.
As the race to master quantum computing continues, a scramble is on to protect critical data. Washington and its allies are working on new encryption standards known as post-quantum cryptography – essentially codes that are much harder to crack, even for a quantum computer. Beijing is trying to pioneer quantum communications networks, a technology theoretically impossible to hack, according to researchers. The scientist spearheading Beijing’s efforts has become a minor celebrity in China.
Quantum computing is radically different. Conventional computers process information as bits – either 1 or 0, and just one number at a time. Quantum computers process in quantum bits, or “qubits,” which can be 1, 0, or any number in between, all at the same time, which physicists say is an approximate way of describing a complex mathematical concept.
These computers also exploit a mysterious property of quantum mechanics known as entanglement. Particles such as photons or electrons can become entangled so that they remain connected, even when separated by huge distances. Changes in one particle are immediately reflected in the other. The properties of qubits and entanglement are fundamental to quantum computers, say physicists and computer scientists, potentially allowing calculations to be carried out that would be impractical on today’s large supercomputers.
Business consultants forecast this processing power will deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in extra revenue by the middle of the next decade. Even before these computers arrive, some are predicting that advances in quantum technology will sharply improve the performance of some military hardware.
Quantum technology “is likely to be as transformational in the 21st century as harnessing electricity as a resource was in the 19th century,” said Michael Biercuk, founder and chief executive officer of Q-CTRL, a quantum tech company that was established in Australia and has major operations in the United States.
It was the codebreaking possibilities of quantum computing that sparked the field’s surge in progress in recent decades, said Q-CTRL’s Biercuk, an American who is a professor of quantum physics at the University of Sydney and a former consultant to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s innovation incubator. The U.S. government saw it as a “big opportunity ” in the 1990s and has been funding research ever since he said.
In his briefing for the Pentagon, QD5’s Kunz cited what he called one of the most successful harvests now/decrypt later operations ever: the Venona project.
Launched in 1943, Venona was a 37-year U.S. effort to decipher Soviet diplomatic communications collected by the Americans during and after World War Two. U.S. codebreakers, aided by allies, were able to decrypt more than 2,900 cables from thousands of messages sent by Soviet intelligence agencies between 1940 and 1948, according to CIA documents.
The cables revealed extensive Communist intelligence operations against the United States and its allies. The code-cracking coup led to the discovery of Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret program to build the first atomic bombs, and the existence of the Cambridge Five, a group of top British civil servants spying for Moscow, the CIA documents show.
The West’s breakthrough was the realization that the Soviets had misused so-called one-time pads: a time-tested form of encryption in which a secret key is used to encode a message sent between parties. The method got its name because in its earliest forms, keys were printed on a pad whose pages each contained a unique code; the top page was ripped off and destroyed after a single use. The Soviets blundered by printing and using duplicate pages in one-time pads for a limited time. This allowed allied analysts to painstakingly decrypt some of the messages years later, according to the CIA documents.
To be truly unbreakable, cybersecurity experts say, a one-time-pad key must be a set of random numbers equal to or bigger than the size of the message – and used only once. The party receiving the message uses the same secret key to decrypt the message. The method was invented more than a century ago, and for decades was used for secret messages by most major powers. But technical factors made it too unwieldy for mass, secure communication in the modern era.
Instead, most communications today are secured with what is known as public key infrastructure (PKI), a system developed in the 1970s to enable encryption on a mass scale.
PKI enabled the rise of the Internet economy and open telecommunications systems. The passwords to email accounts, online banking, and secure messaging platforms all rely on it. PKI is also critical to most government and national security communications.
Security provided by PKI stems essentially from hiding information behind a very difficult math problem, Biercuk said. The most widely used algorithm that creates and manages that difficult math problem used for encryption is known as RSA, from the surname initials of its inventors: the computer scientists and cryptographers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adelman. What may be about to change is that these problems will be a cinch for quantum computers to solve.
“If you have a computer for which that math problem is not very hard,” Biercuk said, “all of that is at risk.”
Montreal-based QD5, the privately held company where Kunz is executive vice president, is taking a different approach to post-quantum cryptography. It has developed an advanced version of the one-time pad: a device, the Q PAD, which it claims customers can use to conduct communications on existing networks that will remain uncrackable forever. Pentagon officials peppered Kunz and colleagues with technical questions about the technology in February but noted the informational session didn’t necessarily signal an intent to buy the Q PAD system.