What to do now about tomorrow’s code-cracking computers

[ergophobe]

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/07/14/what-to-do-now-about-tomorrows-code-cracking-computers

When quantum computers reach their potential, decades of secret intelligence, credit-card details, intellectual property and military and medical data will become as easy to read as the words before your eyes.

Quantum computers... Their powers will be limited to a smallish class of problems; it is an unfortunate coincidence that one of them is unscrambling the calculations in the defence behind which the entire digital economy has been built.

Advances in both quantum machines and the error-correcting and number-crunching algorithms that run on them spill out regularly. The code-cracking threshold may be some years away, but it is rapidly drawing closer. Perhaps a university laboratory will cross the line, or one of the many startups now being launched, or spooks in China or America. A breakthrough may not even make the headlines: it confers a power worth more than good pr.

Computer-scientist types have therefore been hard at work conjuring "post-quantum cryptography" (pqc) protocols: new encryption mathematics that outpaces the capabilities even of quantum machines. None has yet become a trusted standard, but now nist has picked a set of recipes that have survived years of tyre-kicking.

The imprimatur of a world-renowned standards body should be enough to start a general shift to pqc.