Get Ready For The Great Cybersecurity Reboot
Well, the next ten years will see a great transition in Cybersecurity. Why? Because the foundation of cybersecurity on the Internet — and which has developed over four decades — will crumble with the advent of quantum computers.
Shor and Grover showed that the basis of our existing public key methods will fail to be hard problems anymore, and everything we have built using our existing public key methods will be easily cracked. This includes key exchange, digital signatures and public-key encryption.
Just now your browser is happily creating a key exchange using elliptic curve methods (ECDH), and your digital signature probably is probably based on elliptic curves techniques (ECDSA or EdDSA). Even the digital certificate that your browser uses to check from Medium.com is likely to be based on RSA — and which can also be cracked by quantum computers.
And so, as an industry, it will be one of our major challenges to seamlessly migrate our existing fixation with ECC, Discrete Logs and RSA toward the quantum robust methods. Luckily, there are great companies such as Cloudflare and who are building and testing the migration of our existing public key methods towards a post-quantum world. And also where NIST is defining the standard that we will use.
