Looming digital doomsday makes CrowdStrike meltdown look like child’s play

A bad actor in the quantum revolution could unravel our entire economy

Imagine waking up one day to discover that every bank account has been prised open. That no digital record can be trusted. And that the ownership of assets has silently changed overnight. Even worse, chiefs of staff discover that the nuclear codes can’t be kept secret, because there aren’t any secrets any more.
Thirty years ago, a distinguished MIT mathematician called Peter Shor evoked this doomsday scenario by developing a new algorithm based on the theory of quantum computing. It showed that, theoretically at least, a powerful quantum computer could speed up the time it takes to crack almost all of the world’s codes.
The implications are profound. 
“You really don’t want people to change the ownership of data and digital assets, or rewrite history effectively by changing the digital signature,” explains Luke Ibbetson, head of group R&D at Vodafone. “What you think is your private record, all of a sudden isn’t.”
Our reliance on digital systems was highlighted last week when a glitch with CrowdStrike software used by companies ranging from banks to airlines brought large swathes of society to a temporary standstill. That disaster may look like a walk in the park compared to the scenario envisaged by Shor’s work.
Not surprisingly, the algorithm created shockwaves in national security agencies as the implications became clear.
Shor had stamped an expiry date on today’s digital world. He proved that no matter how secure the digital locks we use today are, a new kind of computer would surely unlock them.
“With a sufficiently large and accurate quantum computer, a bad actor could break today’s asymmetric cryptography, which underpins the entire digital economy,” says IBM’s vice president for quantum computing, Scott Crowder.
Quantum computing is as ambitious as any scientific endeavour in our history. It starts from the apparent random behaviour of the smallest units of matter, behaviour that Einstein once derided as “God playing dice”.
Engineers developing quantum machines use sci-fi words like “flux capacitors” and “teleportation”. Quantum computers look the part too: IBM’s version is something you’d expect to find in a steampunk Tardis, an ornate and baroque temple of copper. It uses superconducting wafers that must operate very close to absolute zero temperature, which is much colder than deep space. Other approaches use the molecular properties of atoms and employ laser tweezers to pick off individual electrons.  
Harnessing the theoretical power of quantum physics can greatly speed up computer processing. But it is difficult and unreliable.
The qubits – the quantum equivalent to bits of data – at the heart of the machine aren’t very stable. The “uptime”, or coherence time, of a qubit – how long it can run useful calculations – is measured in milliseconds. 
A classical computer can run a billion operations a second for a billion years before the silicon generates a statistical error. Quantum machines have error rates of one in a thousand, says Michael Cuthbert, director of the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre. This just isn’t good enough. Even more awkwardly for the boffins, a qubit collapses when observed.
Yet despite the challenges, quantum computing is being taken extremely seriously.
The UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre hosts seven different platforms. You can use them for free online, from IBM, Microsoft and others – but it’s very early days.
You may be tempted to file this endeavour alongside nuclear fusion as something that probably won’t happen in our lifetimes. Nevertheless IBM envisages computers with more than 1,000 qubits this year and has already shown that existing quantum systems can perform certain calculations better than classical “brute-force” simulation.
“By the early 2030s we will see quantum systems that are getting large enough to run the blackboard algorithms of Shor,” Crowder believes, though some enthusiasts suspect it will take longer.
Either way, we’re a lot closer to that expiry date of the digital world than when Shor first authored his algorithm. Doomsday may only be a few years away.
Criminal actors are already storing up vast troves of encrypted material that they can’t read. They’re just biding their time, waiting for the day that they can.
Of course, quantum computers are not just dangerous, otherwise reputable people would not be working on them. The technology should open up new fields of discovery in medicine and materials science, in scenario planning, and in identifying patterns in vast amounts of data, such as financial portfolios and network traffic.
In Alex Garland’s brilliant 2020 TV series Devs, a quantum machine visualises Christ on the cross and the different paths the lives of the developers might have taken. That might be a fantasy, but breaking the cryptographic locks we use today is not.
Alongside the race to build stable units of quantum computing is a race to create new cryptographic algorithms that the new computers can’t easily crack. This effort has reached its first significant milestone: the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is about to publish the first batch of entirely new, quantum-proof cryptographic algorithms. This is called PQC, or Post-Quantum Cryptography. It’s taken around eight years to develop four algorithms that NIST approves of. Next comes the job of implementing them.
“Because cryptography is buried in all the protocols we use, uplifting and swapping them all out for ones that are quantum-resistant is not a simple task,” says Ibbetson.
Network operators are working with IBM and NIST, amongst others, to secure the infrastructure. Our own National Cyber Security Centre advises that the PQC transition will happen largely behind the scenes. But it’s a reminder of how much of the digital ledger of our economy can be unravelled at a stroke.
Remember, changing the digital signature effectively rewrites history, says Ibbetson, which is a very dangerous and powerful prospect indeed. NIST’s new algorithms must be bedded down in time for the quantum revolution that gets closer every day.