It’s possible that quantum computers are developing even more quickly than we could have anticipated just five years ago. We believe that the rapid advancement of quantum technology presents a significant opportunity since these machines will likely address significant issues in science and business, revolutionising everything from machine learning and finance to materials science and drug discovery. But this quick advancement also raises a crucial point: in a world where quantum computers are fully developed, the encryption techniques we currently employ to protect private information, such as our banking and medical records, may become outdated.
We must make sure that every step of the computing workflow can shield future systems and data from the “harvest-now, hack-later” that is now taking place as we try to create quantum-centric supercomputing. For governments and heavily regulated sectors like financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications, this is especially important. In reality, everybody in charge of protecting digital infrastructure or data will need to take action right away to become quantum safe. Simply put, waiting is not an option.
83% of businesses globally have experienced more than one data breach in their lifetime, according to IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report.
In India, firms reported 29,500 breaches on average, according to the same survey (between March 2021-March 2022). India has to quickly begin building quantum-safe protocols in both government and commercial institutions that handle sensitive data.
Governments all over the world are worried that malicious actors are setting themselves up to profit from the newest code-breaking technologies. Large chunks of encrypted data that are unreadable with current tools could be stolen and hoarded by attackers with the intention of decrypting it later when better quantum technology becomes available. It’s possible that organisations have already experienced breaches that they won’t learn about for many years, which makes the situation for security and liability risky. We may not be able to predict with certainty when today’s encryption will be vulnerable, but one thing is certain: any data that is compromised before a company switches to quantum-safe methods should be regarded as already gone.
establishing the criteria
Organizations cannot afford to wait, and using safe cryptography can already be done. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the United States Department of Commerce revealed four quantum-safe protocols as its “post-quantum cryptography standards, “which they want to complete within the following few years.
While it would be crucial to protect crucial Indian data with quantum-safe encryption, there is also a big potential here for Indian technologists and the IT sector. The Y2K bug that occurred at the turn of the millennium gave India’s IT sector its biggest boost. On January 1, 2000, businesses all over the world raced to find a solution to the date change issue that could have crippled sectors as diverse as finance, aviation, and mining. To correct the error, it was frequently necessary to traverse thousands or even millions of lines of code. Trained programmers were required for this. The Indian software sector embraced the chance.
Fixing the “YQK” issue this time with the quantum “Q” “—gives India an even greater opportunity. The time has come for the Indian standards groups, business community, and government to take swift action to address the issue and determine how the Indian IT industry can both contribute to and benefit from it.
Hurry up.
Business executives should be ready for how their industry can gain as the so-called “quantum advantage” approaches. However, businesses should be aware of the danger posed by fault-tolerant quantum computers in the future and look into possible countermeasures based on quantum-safe cryptographic norms, like the IBM hybrid cloud system z16, which will safeguard their data and conventional systems.
The computer in your next automobile or the one inside a satellite, for example, will need to be quantum-secure well in advance of the threat if it is to function securely without significant changes over a number of years. Can you wait if you have to?
