[BreachExchange] The US is worried that hackers are stealing data today so quantum computers can crack it in a decade

[Terrell Byrd]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/03/1039171/hackers-quantum-computers-us-homeland-security-cryptography/

While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US
government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat:
attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that
they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future.

The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from
the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made
of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at
the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much
faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain
practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the
encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as
personal, trade, and state secrets.

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive
and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country
from this long-term danger need to begin right now.

“The threat of a nation-state adversary getting a large quantum computer
and being able to access your information is real,” says Dustin Moody, a
mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
“The threat is that they copy down your encrypted data and hold on to it
until they have a quantum computer.”

“Adversaries and nation states are likely doing it,” he says. “It’s a very
real threat that governments are aware of. They're taking it seriously and
they're preparing for it. That's what our project is doing.”

Faced with this “harvest now and decrypt later” strategy, officials are
trying to develop and deploy new encryption algorithms to protect secrets
against an emerging class of powerful machines. That includes the
Department of Homeland Security, which says it is leading a long and
difficult transition to what is known as post-quantum cryptography.

“We don’t want to end up in a situation where we wake up one morning and
there’s been a technological breakthrough, and then we have to do the work
of three or four years within a few months—with all the additional risks
associated with that,” says Tim Maurer, who advises the secretary of
homeland security on cybersecurity and emerging technology.

DHS recently released a road map for the transition, beginning with a call
to catalogue the most sensitive data, both inside the government and in the
business world. Maurer says this is a vital first step “to see which
sectors are already doing that, and which need assistance or awareness to
make sure they take action now.”

Preparing in advance
Experts say it could still be a decade or more before quantum computers are
able to accomplish anything useful, but with money pouring into the field
in both China and the US, the race is on to make it happen—and to design
better protections against quantum attacks.

The US, through NIST, has been holding a contest since 2016 that aims to
produce the first quantum-computer-proof algorithms by 2024, according to
Moody, who leads NIST’s project on post-quantum cryptography.

Transitioning to new cryptography is a notoriously tricky and lengthy task,
and one it’s easy to ignore until it’s too late. It can be difficult to get
for-profit organizations to spend on an abstract future threat years before
that threat becomes reality.

“If organizations aren’t thinking about the transition now,” says Maurer,
“and then they become overwhelmed by the time the NIST process has been
completed and the sense of urgency is there, it increases the risk of
accidental incidents … Rushing any such transition is never a good idea.”

As more organizations begin to consider the looming threat, a small and
energetic industry has sprouted up, with companies already selling products
that promise post-quantum cryptography. But DHS officials have explicitly
warned against purchasing them, because there is still no consensus about
how such systems will need to work.

“No,” the department stated unequivocally in a document released last
month. “Organizations should wait until strong, standardized commercial
solutions are available that implement the upcoming NIST recommendations to
ensure interoperability as well as solutions that are strongly vetted and
globally acceptable.”

But experts are pessimistic about how the transition will go.

If it takes a long time for quantum computers to get to the point where
they can solve a useful problem, “I think companies will forget the hype
and implement the weakest thing that comes out of NIST until they are
suddenly reminded of the problem in 30 years,” Vadim Lyubashevsky, a
cryptographer at IBM who’s working on post-quantum cryptographic algorithms
with NIST, told MIT Technology Review last year.

And that is exactly the scenario national security officials want to avoid.
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