Quantum Computing: Why has become a must on securing digital products in 2022?
From the beginning security methods have been focused on slowing down the process from which you can break a security system. But now, security methods are facing a revolutionary opponent: we live in an age when Quantum Computing makes all the difference in processing speed.
Even though a small group of companies is leading the development of quantum computers, each step they’ve made has been a giant leap for speed-up processing.
Quantum Computing
But, before getting into the state of the art, what does “Quantum computing” mean? Quantum Computing (QC), unlike a classical computer like our everyday PCs and smartphones, takes advantage of Quantum Mechanics principles.
Taking advantage of superposition, quantum teleportation, measurement, no-cloning theorem and other quantum characteristics, QC is pushing the limits of processing.
While a Classical processes instructions one at a time, a Quantum computer processes them simultaneously.
A real concern
Nowadays, whether we are speaking of a long password or encryption based on guessing factors of a number, with enough time, you’ll end up breaking it.
The key is “how much time” is enough. Well, using the best supercomputer available to break our daily basis encryption (2048-bit RSA) could cost you at least millions of years to break it down.
What if I told you Quantum Computing is nearly cutting down that time from millions of years to seconds?
In 1994, Peter Shor developed an algorithm which takes advantage of Quantum Computing and provides the ability to decrypt a 2048-bit RSA in seconds.
A year later Luv Grover provided a quantum search algorithm which runs 10 times faster than a classical computer search algorithm.
So, what can we do against this?
Quantum Computing: 50% problem / 50% solution
Even though these algorithms have been going around for quite some time, Quantum Computers are still in development and we shouldn’t expect to see Shor’s algorithm in practice at least until 2025.
In the meantime, as a higher power of quantum computation arises, a stronger quantum encryption does too.
A new cryptography branch has been born called post-quantum cryptography, which provides safer methods against cryptanalytic attacks by a quantum computer.
What to expect
Multiple companies and organizations are evolving their development areas to investigate new ways of quantum encryption to avoid being hacked before quantum supremacy arrives.
Big techs companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM are battling every day to see who has the faster quantum computer.
Additionally, they signed a contract with big-name partners like JPMorgan Chase or Barclays to be involved in this cutting-edge technology.
Near us, this month, NIST announced their recommended mechanism to secure data against attacks using quantum computers.
And Ualá is not falling behind, we work every day to provide the best financial services with the most innovative technology, so we are proud to announce we have included quantum computing in our current tech stack.
We are very excited to share our experience with this technology and show its capabilities in financial services, but that’s a story for another article.
