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.

Kvanttitietokoneet uhkaavat murtaa internetin nykyisen luottamusmallin. Kanadassa tähän varaudutaan jo käytännössä. Québec Cityssä on avattu uusi solmu Kirq-testialustaan, jossa kvanttiturvallista datansiirtoa testataan aidossa verkkoympäristössä.

Testialustaa operoi Numana, joka yhdistää Sherbrooken, Montréalin ja nyt Québec Cityn samaan kvanttiturvalliseen verkkosilmukkaan. Kyse ei ole laboratoriokokeesta, vaan ympäristöstä, joka vastaa oikeaa runko- ja operaattoriverkkoa.

Kvanttiuhka ei kohdistu kaikkeen salaukseen. Symmetrinen salaus, kuten AES, säilyy käyttökelpoisena. Sen sijaan kvanttikoneet pystyvät murtamaan nykyiset asymmetriset menetelmät, joilla hoidetaan avaintenvaihto ja tunnistautuminen.

Juuri tätä Kirqissa testataan. Miten RSA- ja ECC-pohjaiset ratkaisut korvataan ilman, että verkot hajoavat. Käytännössä testaus nojaa NIST:n standardoimiin PQC-algoritmeihin (post-quantum cryptography). Niitä ajetaan TLS- ja IP-verkoissa sekä hybridimalleissa, joissa klassinen ja kvanttiturvallinen salaus toimivat rinnakkain.

Microchip tuo dsPIC33A-perheeseen uuden DSC-ohjaimen, joka yhdistää nopean analogian, tarkan reaaliaikaohjauksen ja post-kvanttitietoturvan. Integraation tavoitteena on yksinkertaistaa erityisesti datakeskusten tehonmuunnosta ja moottoriohjausta. Samalla se nostaa esiin kysymyksen siitä, kuinka paljon yhdellä piirillä voidaan oikeasti korvata erilliskomponentteja.

Uusi dsPIC33AK256MPS306 laajentaa Microchipin DSC-valikoimaa suuntaan, jossa yksi ohjainpiiri hoitaa sekä ohjauksen, mittauksen että tietoturvan. Keskeinen muutos on korkean resoluution PWM:n, nopeiden ADC-muuntimien ja kryptokiihdytyksen tuominen samaan pakettiin, mikä tähtää erityisesti datakeskusten tehonsyöttöihin ja korkean taajuuden tehoelektroniikkaan.

Piiri perustuu 200 megahertsin 32-bittiseen ytimeen, jossa on liukulukuyksikkö. Analogiapuoli on poikkeuksellisen raskas: useita 40 MSPS:n 12-bittisiä AD-muuntimia, nopeita komparaattoreita ja DAC-toimintoja. Yhdistelmä mahdollistaa tiheämmät ja nopeammat säätösilmukat esimerkiksi SiC- ja GaN-pohjaisissa teholähteissä, joissa kytkentätaajuudet kasvavat.

Integraation merkitys näkyy erityisesti BOM-kustannuksissa ja layoutissa. Kun mittaus, ohjaus ja osa suojaustoiminnoista saadaan samaan piiriin, ulkoisten komponenttien määrä vähenee.

A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines
https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/

My position on the urgency of rolling out quantum-resistant cryptography has changed compared to just a few months ago. You might have heard this privately from me in the past weeks, but it’s time to signal and justify this change of mind publicly.

There had been rumors for a while of expected and unexpected progress towards cryptographically-relevant quantum computers, but over the last week we got two public instances of it.

First, Google published a paper revising down dramatically the estimated number of logical qubits and gates required to break 256-bit elliptic curves like NIST P-256 and secp256k1, which makes the attack doable in minutes on fast-clock architectures like superconducting qubits. They weirdly1 frame it around cryptocurrencies and mempools and salvaged goods or something, but the far more important implication are practical WebPKI MitM attacks.