To understand the risk, we need to distinguish between the three cryptographic primitives that are used to protect your connection when browsing on the Internet: Symmetric encryption. So what can we do? Encryption, key agreement and signatures
Initially, these machines were (and still are) too small and too error-prone to be threatening to the integrity of public-key cryptography, but there is a clear and impending danger: it only seems a matter of time now before a quantum computer is built that has the capability to break public-key cryptography. Back in 1994, quantum computers existed only on paper.īut in the years since, physicists started building actual quantum computers. Luckily, Shor’s algorithm doesn’t run on just any computer: it needs a quantum computer. With it, you can break nearly all public-key cryptography deployed today, including RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. Our story starts in 1994, when mathematician Peter Shor discovered a marvelous algorithm that efficiently factors numbers and computes discrete logarithms. In this long blog post, we explain how we got here, what NIST chose to standardize, what it will mean for the Internet, and what you need to know to get started with your own post-quantum preparations.
We have been working towards this day for many years, by implementing post-quantum cryptography, contributing to standards, and testing post-quantum cryptography in practice, and we are excited to share our perspective. We almost got it right, except for a single choice we didn’t expect-and which changes everything.Īt Cloudflare, post-quantum cryptography is a topic close to our heart, as the future of a secure and private Internet is on the line. We were already drafting this post with an educated guess on the choice NIST would make. On Tuesday, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced which post-quantum cryptography they will standardize.
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