Cryptographers are in the business of being paranoid, but their fears over quantum computers might be justified. Quantum computers are still in the early stages of development. While traditional computers store information as either zeros or ones, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which represent and store information as both zeros and ones simultaneously. If bad actors ever got their hands on a powerful enough quantum computer, they could break into anything encrypted with RSA, representing a huge swath of the internet. Vadim Lyubashevsky of IBM Research Europe is a co-author on three of the finalist submissions in a competition to develop new encryption standards.

Source: Wall Street Journal October 07, 2020 21:00 UTC