With quantum computers it’ll be possible to crack even the toughest of encryptions, revealing everyone’s secrets from classified intelligence cables to billionaires’ nude pics.
IBM, Microsoft, Google and Huawei are locked in a corporate arms race to be the first to build a machine that could make decryption irrelevant.
In 2019, Google claimed to have achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ (being the first to solve a complex mathematical problem that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years in just 200 seconds).
This led the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to launch a competition to develop quantum-proof encrypting algorithms, which are being rolled out on messaging platforms like Signal and iMessage.
However, such algorithms can’t be updated over the cloud without suspecting they’ve come from a quantum imposter.
In the worst-case scenario, crypto experts believe Q-Day will lead to an era of post-privacy, with no expectation of secrecy, andmajor industries slowing to a crawl.
