Ssh! Our Existing PKI Infrastructure and Many Cryptocurrencies Will Fail In a Post-Quantum World

Quantum Computers at scale might be more than five years away, but we do need to start to think about our migration

Ssh! Don’t say this too loudly, but all of the digital signatures that we have been producing will be cracked on the onset of quantum computers. This includes RSA signatures (DSA) and Elliptic Curve signatures (ECDSA and EdDSA). This means that every Bitcoin or Ethereum transaction could be faked, and where all of the existing cryptocurrency could be hacked. We will, though, have found a way to migrate our existing methods of cryptocurrency to quantum robust methods before quantum computers are able to crack them.

It’s not only in cryptocurrency that we will see problems but in virtually all of our applications that are signed by our existing methods. At great risk is the PKI infrastructure, and where our digital certificates are signed for the public key with the signature of a trusted entity. With quantum computers, these signatures would be easily faked, and where the private key could be discovered.

So what can we do? Well, we need to replace our existing public key methods (RSA, Elliptic Curve and Discrete Logs) with quantum robust…