Behind the Curtain: AI's looming cyber nightmare

[lapfog_1]

2. Quantum computing is much more of a threat

Quantum computers, by leveraging Shor's algorithm, would pose an existential threat to all widely used asymmetric (public-key) encryption systems. These algorithms rely on the mathematical difficulty of factoring large prime numbers or solving discrete logarithm problems, which a powerful quantum computer could solve exponentially faster than any classical computer.

Vulnerable schemes include:
RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman): A widely used asymmetric algorithm that relies on prime factorization.
ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography): Another asymmetric method offering similar security to RSA with smaller key sizes, which is also vulnerable to Shor's algorithm.
Diffie-Hellman (DH) and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH): Key exchange protocols used to establish secure communication, which would become insecure.

I did a lot of the early work on RSA encryption... many of these are still in use.