This is the first of a series of technical blogs that DigiCert is publishing on quantum computing and the coming post-quantum transition. Upcoming articles will provide additional, easy-to-understand information about what is happening and steps that can be taken now to prepare for the future. Bookmark our blog and follow us on Twitter @digicert to stay informed.

The Committee on Technical Assessment of the Feasibility and Implications of Quantum computing, part of the National Academy of Sciences, recently released a report entitled “Quantum Computing: Progress and Prospects”.  The 200-page report gathers the consensus of industry experts and conveys an important message about the current state of quantum computing and its threat to modern cryptography: the time to start preparing for a quantum-safe future is now.

DigiCert has estimated that it takes several quadrillion years to factor a 2048-bit RSA key using classical computing technology, an estimate that is referenced in the National Academy’s report. However, a sufficiently capable quantum computer can break the same key much faster, perhaps in only a few months. There are still many technical challenges that must be overcome before it is possible to build a quantum computer that threatens RSA and ECC, the two main asymmetric cryptographic algorithms that the internet’s security is based on. The report estimates that such a quantum computer must be five orders of magnitude larger, with two orders of magnitude lower error rates, than the first-generation quantum computers that exist today, and likely requires technological advancements that haven’t been invented yet.

Given the early state of the field, with rapid progress towards being able to build quantum computers only beginning to accelerate within the last few years, the report concludes it is still too early to be able to predict when it will be possible to build a scalable quantum computer. Progress towards that goal must track not only the scaling rate of the number of physical qubits the computers have, but also the error rates.

Error rates are important because they have a big impact on the number of physical qubits required to make a logical qubit. Physical qubits are the individual quantum systems that represent either a ‘0’ or a ‘1’. However, physical qubits are prone to errors, through unavoidable interactions with their environment, even at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Uncorrected, it is impossible to perform large, complex calculations involving qubits without the errors quickly overwhelming the calculation.

Many physical qubits can be combined into a single logical qubit, much in the same way that classical error correcting codes use several classical bits to encode a single classical bit. However, the overhead for quantum error correcting codes are much larger. Researchers have yet to produce even a single logical qubit, however progress is rapidly being made towards that goal. Once logical qubits are available, tracking the number of logical qubits will be the preferred metric. The committee concluded that “no fundamental reason why a large, fault-tolerant quantum computer could not be built in principle.”

While it will take a long time to overcome those obstacles, it will also take a long time to develop, standardize and deploy post-quantum cryptographic techniques. In fact, the timescales are probably roughly the same. Especially for high assurance applications, it is critical to begin the transition effort now, to avoid the possibility that quantum computers will arrive before our cryptographic techniques are capable of protecting critical information.

In the near term, research and development into commercial applications of noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers will probably drive progress in this area. How useful these computers turn out to be, and what problems they are able to solve, will probably be the driver for increased investments in improving quantum computing technologies. Right now, the field is extremely active, with billions of dollars of research funding being committed to the race to produce larger and more capable quantum computers.

Industry standards groups are also preparing for a post-quantum future, and DigiCert is very active in these efforts. Most well-known is the NIST post-quantum cryptography project, which is working with researchers around the world to develop new cryptographic primitives that are not susceptible to attack by quantum computers. However, it will be several years before those algorithms are ready for standardization. A simpler technology (hash-based signatures, RFC 8391) has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force and will soon be standardized by NIST. While it has some drawbacks compared to more advanced algorithms, namely larger signatures and a limit on the total number of signings, it has the advantage of being well-understood, quantum-safe and available now.

Other efforts by standards groups include ANSI X9’s Quantum Risk Study Group, which is preparing an information report specifically examining the threat quantum computing poses to cryptography being used in the financial services industry. The report is expected to be available in early 2019. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) also has a Quantum Safe Cryptography group, which has been producing information reports for the past nine years.

These two parallel efforts are rapidly heating up: one, by those who are exploring how to build large, fault-tolerant quantum computers, and the other, by those who are seeking to make sure quantum-safe cryptography is available and ready to be deployed before that happens. DigiCert will be producing a series of blog posts to help readers understand this important transition, and what they can do to protect their systems from the upcoming threat to existing asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, like RSA and ECC.