Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too.
There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. That information’s privacy relies on encryption, a way to mathematically scramble data to prevent any snoops from deciphering it — even with the help of powerful computers.
But the mathematical basis of these techniques is under threat from a foe that has, until recently, seemed hypothetical: quantum computers.
In the 1990s, scientists realized that these computers could exploit the weird physics of the minuscule realm of atoms and electrons to perform certain types of calculations out of reach for standard computers. That means that once the quantum machines are powerful enough, they could crack the mathematical padlocks on encrypted data, laying bare the world’s secrets.
2023-06-28 06:00:00
Source from www.sciencenews.org
