TECH TALK: THE DAY WHEN HACKERS WILL FINALLY CONQUER ALL!
Technology is often an arms race between two or more sides vying for supremacy. But a day may come when hackers will quite easily beat the people standing against them…
Read Time: 6 Minutes
Computers aren’t all that hard to understand. Everything they do ultimately boils down to a collection of bits, which can only be in one or two mutually-exclusive states: they can either be a ‘0’ or a ‘1’. But the prospect of quantum computing changes that, introducing quantum bits or “qubits” into the equation, which can actually be a superposition of both states.
It’s quite a complicated topic, which deserves a dedicated piece explaining how it all works—but that will have to wait for another time. For the purposes of this piece, it's enough to simply understand that this new form of computation would make computers much more powerful than they are right now. And “Q-Day” is the hypothetical day when the practice is accessible and powerful enough to render the traditional methods of information security utterly useless.
Encryption is at the very heart of so much of what happens in information technology these days. Put simply: it involves turning legible data into something that can’t be understood on its face, so that it can be safely transmitted or secured away, and only made understandable again by the appropriate party.
It’s isn’t hyperbole to say that just about everything we do in the modern world revolves around encryption. It’s the driving force behind the internet, and facilitates so much of what we do on a daily basis.
A number of different methods can be used to encrypt data. For example, you’ll see a lot of prime numbers used in various algorithms—due to the mathematical unpredictability of prime numbers. Unpredictability is obviously important when you’re trying to keep people from undoing your encryption.
The thing is, unpredictability can be overcome with brute force. And brute force can be made even more powerful with the application of some cleverness here and there.
Just as an example, given the prevalence of using two different prime numbers to generate an encryption key, it's possible with current technology to roughly estimate the range which the two prime numbers used fall within. You can base it on how long the encryption takes to complete. That information can be very useful, as it allows you to try using different combinations of prime numbers, all the while excluding ones that fall outside of the range, in order to reduce the number of possibilities to try.
Finding the two prime numbers successfully is of the utmost importance if you have your eyes set on the data being encrypted, and presently it's quite cumbersome to do in the age of bits. But quantum computation and the use of qubits makes a task like this a walk in the park, and will make the prime number algorithms used in many encryption methods look ridiculously primitive.
Q-Day is the day—weeks, months, or years from now—when that threshold finally gets crossed. And while there’s every chance the big players in the industry will have the capacity to protect themselves if the revelation is still many years away, experts are of the opinion that a lot of damage will still be able to be done while smaller players and developing nations try to catch up.
So when exactly is Q-Day due to arrive? Well, as is so often the case with technology, we don’t really know. A few eager experts have suggested it would happen in 2025, but that was largely dismissed as hyperbolic, and is looking increasingly unlikely as the year slowly draws to a close. The bulk of expert opinions on the topic seem to place it between the years 2030 and 2050, but the iterative nature of technological progress theoretically means the next big breakthrough could come at any time.
Quantum computation exists in a very rudimentary form today, that seems to be far from able to be applied in such a way as to meaningfully challenge today’s encryption algorithms. But estimating the trajectory that its development is taking is very big business. As it stands, companies have to balance how much to invest in quantum computing safeguards, and those caught not taking it seriously enough run the risk of taking a big hit if they’re left behind.
Speaking of money, that appears to be a pretty big stumbling block to getting into the realm of quantum computing. Whereas traditional computers are built around a certain amount of Random Access Memory or hard drive space, quantum computers depend entirely on the number of qubits that it houses. And sadly, fabricating even one is a ridiculously expensive prospect.
At the moment, there are apparently some 100 to 200 qubit systems in existence—well below the 1,000 or so qubits that it’s estimated would be needed in order to actually start tackling simple real-world use cases. And given that a 1,000 qubit system could cost roughly $100 million at the moment, it's unlikely that too many players can throw their hat into the ring to explore this exciting new tech.
As it stands, quantum computing is only in its infancy. But once we get a grasp of it, our computational power immediately increases by orders of magnitude, and that poses lots of unique challenges for cybersecurity.
So much so, that post-quantum cryptography has become a booming niche within the world of information security. Some of the best and brightest in the field are hard at work trying to devise methods that would stand up to the unbridled processing power of a quantum computer. And this movement isn’t recent either, it’s been a thing for decades at this point.
Will we be able to stand up to the power of quantum computers and remain able to secure data? Or are we destined to be defeated by our own ingenuity and be forever stuck? I'm not sure, but there are some reasons to be optimistic. And if we can use quantum computers to break into things, I’m confident we’ll also be able to harness their power to protect things as well…