China, Technology, Power & Security, United States A Quantum Sputnik Moment

When people think about high-tech competition with China, they usually think about space. But while moon landings and Mars missions might capture the competitive imagination, there is an even bigger, but much less appreciated, tech race underway: quantum computing. This has major national security implications: a cyber attack powered by quantum computing against the United States could be worse by orders of magnitude than a conventional attack, leading to disruptions of the national power grid or trillions of dollars in losses to a single financial institution.

Quantum computers have the potential to break RSA encryption, the protocol that underlies almost all of today’s secure encoding of banking information, sensitive military secrets, and access to energy grids. Therefore, a cyber attack launched with a quantum computer would leave all systems reliant on RSA encryption today vulnerable, including AES-256 encryption used heavily by the U.S. military. To protect national security, the United States needs to continue making encryption protocols quantum-safe to defend against such attacks.

Read more in Just Security >>