Suomalainen kvanttialgoritmiyhtiö QMill ja Telia Finland ovat demonstroineet uudenlaista “kvanttivahvistettua” salausmenetelmää mobiiliverkoille. Kyse ei kuitenkaan ole perinteisestä kvanttiavainten jakelusta eli QKD-teknologiasta, vaan uudesta lähestymistavasta, jossa kvanttilaskenta osallistuu salauksen vahvistamiseen.

Yhtiöiden mukaan uusi menetelmä on suunniteltu suojaamaan viestejä sekä klassisilla että tulevaisuuden kvanttitietokoneilla toteutettavia hyökkäyksiä vastaan. Ratkaisun kerrotaan toimivan paikallisten tai pilvipohjaisten kvanttitietokoneiden avulla.

Telian mukaan demonstraatio kohdistui mobiiliverkon kaikkein kriittisimpään osaan. Yhtiö arvioi, että teknologiaa voitaisiin tulevaisuudessa soveltaa laajemminkin salattuun viestintään.

– Verkkojemme turvallisuus muuttuu yhä tärkeämmäksi erityisesti kriittisille asiakkaillemme. Tässä ensimmäisessä demonstraatiossa keskityimme verkkomme kriittisimpään osaan, mutta menetelmää voitaisiin soveltaa paljon laajemminkin, sanoo Telia Finlandin puolustusasiakkaista vastaava johtaja Jari Collin tiedotteessa.

Experts have known about the hypothetical risk of Q-Day since the 1990s. But Google recently warned that quantum computers may be able to hack some encrypted systems by 2029. https://cnn.it/4eRJL5o

Insider Brief

Project Eleven awarded its Q-Day Prize to Giancarlo Lelli for demonstrating a 15-bit elliptic curve key break on a quantum computer.
The result extends prior public demonstrations and shows continued progress in quantum attacks on elliptic curve cryptography.
The work highlights ongoing reductions in resource estimates for larger-scale attacks and the need for migration to post-quantum cryptography.

Quantum computing poses a fundamental threat to widely used encryption systems including RSA, elliptic curve cryptography, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which secure everything from online banking to government communications, with algorithms like Shor’s algorithm capable of breaking these schemes exponentially faster than classical computers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has standardized post-quantum cryptographic algorithms designed to resist quantum attacks, and organizations worldwide are beginning the complex process of migrating critical systems to these new encryption methods.
The “harvest now, decrypt later” threat – where adversaries collect encrypted data today to decrypt once quantum computers become available – creates urgency for organizations handling sensitive long-term data, even though large-scale quantum computers capable of breaking encryption remain years away.
The cryptographic landscape is splitting between post-quantum cryptography (mathematical algorithms resistant to quantum attacks) and quantum key distribution (physics-based security using quantum networking), with governments, financial institutions, and technology companies investing billions in both approaches.

We don’t actually need quantum computers to have that crisis, just an algorithm that proves that P = NP.

Quantum resistant encryption is readily available today. The EU have a preferred algorithm as does the US. It just needs companies to change over to them. However. Some countries have been archiving encrypted communications from snooping operations for the day they can use quantum computers to decrypt them – national secrets and the like.

Anyone who says Y2K was a load of nothing is incredibly uneducated. The world pulled off some massive bugfixing and patching to prevent disaster in major infrastructure. Just because some office desktop pcs didn’t explode, don’t assume everything was easy.

“Y2K” wasn’t actually (even remotely) a ‘crisis’ though… so everything should be chill.

It’s important note that even switching to post-quantum cryptography isn’t going to make everything secure since all historic encrypted data that was already collected can still be decrypted.

Quantum computers could usher in a crisis worse than Y2K
The day when a quantum computer manages to break common encryption, or Q-Day, is fast approaching, and the world is not close to being ready
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522615-quantum-computers-could-usher-in-a-crisis-worse-than-y2k/?fbclid=IwdGRjcARNTWFjbGNrBE1NLGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHrHIleI1jdGKN2b8yGxw6_rjvAbdqUoklPTbxufdiPZeOrhkN4Yir7whZTWd_aem_MnxkuDN_51gam0Hve0Tjdg&utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv1_a1demo0ecg7rma

Quantum computers could cause a global security crisis that makes the once-feared millennium bug, or Y2K, look quaint. This infamous computer risk was averted through the persistent behind-the-scenes work of engineers across the world, but whether the new threat will be tackled similarly is an urgent yet unresolved question.

Most digital communications and transactions are protected by cryptography based on mathematical problems that are unsolvable by conventional computers but are solvable by a sufficiently capable quantum computer. Researchers have understood this since the late 1990s, but the day when this capable-enough quantum computer comes online – or Q-Day – was thought to be very far in the future. Much has changed since.