Quantum Computing Is Coming for Your Data

The news that disturbed my digital life came two years ago in a snail mail letter strewn with phrases like “malicious cyber intrusion” and “identity theft.” A relative’s company had been part of a massive hack, the note said, leaving my information exposed. Before the letter came, I was a cyber security neophyte: I didn’t use a VPN and encrypted websites were just for banking. I often shopped online, depositing my credit card number over coffee shop wifi.

Since then, I’ve gotten better. My Android is filled with WhatsApp and Signal—which use end-to-end encryption—and my finance apps encrypt my data with both hardware and software. With things outside of my control, like my now-compromised social security number, I reassure myself that big organizations use encryption to house sensitive data, so my social must be unreadable to hackers.

But it turns out that all this encryption might not matter. Internet users like me have long relied on encryption for security and peace of mind, but cryptography experts are becoming aware of its faults—namely, that encryption can only protect against the tools we have now, and better, smarter tools are on the horizon. Quantum computers, which are fundamentally different from traditional computers because they leverage quantum mechanics to do calculations, could easily decrypt the advanced encryption we use widely. So even if encrypted data is safe from today’s hackers, it’s potentially vulnerable to hackers of the future.