Are you excited by the new US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 203? Did you inhale sharply when, last year, the US government announced a switch to the Crystals-Kyber algorithm? No? Weird.
Well, what if I said that this planned change was a prediction. One that should worry every MP with a porn subscription, every Iranian dissident with a messaging app, everybody who has used online banking — everyone in fact.
The prediction? The biggest release of secrets in history is coming. Oh, and we are due a revolution in materials science, drug discovery and a whole lot more. Because quantum computers are on their way.
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Internet security is a minor mathematical miracle. Your bank can tell you how to encrypt data, without telling eavesdroppers how to decrypt it. This — public key cryptography — is the basic plumbing of the internet. It only works because of a quirk of maths. Multiplying numbers is easy. Doing the reverse — factorising them — is hard.
Peter Shor, a computer scientist, found a way 30 years ago to make that easy, too. The catch? It required a quantum computer, harnessing the weird subatomic behaviour of particles. It needed a computer that didn’t exist, with a mechanism so fantastical that one of the genuine explanations mooted for how it could work is that when you built one, different versions of you also built one in a million parallel universes and then you pooled your results.
How fantastical is this now? This week Google announced it had a quantum computer that could perform tasks classical ones cannot. A few months ago I went to see a company, Oxford Quantum Circuits, which is installing one in a data centre in Winnersh, Berskshire. Quantum computers aren’t yet big enough to run Shor’s algorithm, but if they are fantastical, so is Winnersh.
When, then, will encryption break? People used to say 2040. Now those same people say 2035. Probably, we will be ready. The US announcement is about changing communications to a standard that can’t be hacked even by a quantum computer.
But, and here is the key point, it will still be too late. Last week The Sunday Times warned that China had harvested data belonging to every Briton. In intelligence agencies everywhere terabytes of unreadable messages have been stored: embarrassing secrets, commercial secrets, blackmailable secrets. They await the day they can be read.
The coming of quantum computers is scary. It is also exhilarating. By using the behaviour of particles to manipulate information, quantum computers model things particles do. We can design new treatments, understand biology and open a universe of new materials.
The economic potential is vast. It is also, it turns out, yet another nascent innovation in which, thanks to its universities, the UK has a global lead. Which, thanks to our present malaise, we are presumably finding innovative ways to throw away.
Ilyas Khan is one of those hoping we won’t. He is the founder of Quantinuum, the leading UK quantum computing firm. At The Times Tech Summit this week, he was asked if encryption is about to fall. Yes, he said, but added that in the coming revolution that’s the least interesting thing quantum computers will do. Which given how interesting it will be, is saying something.