By Vikram Sharma, Encryption Expert and CEO and Founder of Quintessence Labs
For me, this is a particularly exciting time in the history of secure communications. Recently, we’ve seen the effects of cyber-attacks on the business world. Data breaches have caused losses of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. It wouldn’t take many large attacks to ravage the world economy.
About 15 years ago, when I learnt of a newfound ability to create quantum effects that don’t exist in nature, I was excited. The idea of applying the fundamental laws of physics to make encryption stronger really intrigued me.
How does this work? Well, there are three important elements in encryption:
- An encryption key
- The key exchange
- The encryption algorithm
The encryption algorithm is like a lock, which encodes and decodes the document. Using the key, it encodes the text in the documents, converting them into random numbers. If someone were to open the document without the encryption key and the algorithm, they wouldn’t be able to read the documents; it would simply look like a bunch of random numbers.
Most security systems rely on a secure method for key exchange to communicate the encryption key to the right place. However, rapid increases in computational power are putting at risk a number of the key exchange methods we have today.
In recent years, there’s been a growing body of research looking at using quantum effects to make encryption stronger. With advances in quantum computing, which leverages the microscopic properties of nature to deliver unimaginable increases in computational power, it’s never been more important to encrypt. Quantum computers are so powerful that they will crack many of the encryption systems we use today…Click here to read full article.
