“Let’s say that a quantum computer is deployed in 2024,” says Rescorla. Data thieves who eavesdrop on Internet traffic could already be accumulating encrypted data, which they could unlock once quantum computers become available, potentially viewing everything from our medical histories to our old banking records. “A real quantum computer would be extremely dangerous,” says Eric Rescorla, chief technology officer of the Firefox browser team at Mozilla in San Francisco, California.Īs in a cheesy time-travel trope, the machines that don’t yet exist endanger not only our future communications, but also our current and past ones. If they reach their full scale, quantum computers would crack current encryption algorithms exponentially faster than even the best non-quantum machines can. And they work well: even with the best supercomputers available today, breaking the codes that the online world currently runs on would be an almost hopeless task.īut machines that will exploit the quirks of quantum physics threaten that entire deal. These are the systems that scramble data to protect our privacy, establish our identity and secure our payments. In cybersecurity circles, they call it Q-day: the day when quantum computers will break the Internet.Īlmost everything we do online is made possible by the quiet, relentless hum of cryptographic algorithms.
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