The race to transition online security protocols to ones that can’t be cracked by a quantum computer is already on. The algorithms that are commonly used today to protect data online—RSA and elliptic curve cryptography—are uncrackable by supercomputers, but a large enough quantum computer would make quick work of them. There are algorithms secure enough to be out of reach for both classical and future quantum machines, called post-quantum cryptography, but transitioning to these is a work in progress.
Late last month, the team at Google Quantum AI published a whitepaper that added significant urgency to this race. In it, the team showed that the size of a quantum computer that would pose a cryptographic threat is approximately 20 times smaller than previously thought. This is still far from accessible to the quantum computers that exist today: The largest machines currently consist of approximately 1,000 quantum bits, or qubits, and the whitepaper estimated that about 500 times as much is needed. Nonetheless, this shortens the timeline to switch over to post-quantum algorithms.
The news had a surprising beneficiary: Obscure cryptocurrency Algorand jumped 44% in price in response. The whitepaper called out Algorand specifically for implementing post-quantum cryptography on their blockchain. We caught up with Algorand’s chief scientific officer and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Chris Peikert, to understand how this announcement is impacting cryptography, why cryptocurrencies are feeling the effects, and what the future might hold. Peikert’s early work on a particular type of algorithm known as lattice cryptography underlies most post-quantum security today.
IEEE Spectrum: What is the significance of this Google Quantum AI whitepaper?
Peikert: The upshot of this paper is that it shows that a quantum computer would be able to break some of the cryptography that is most widely used, especially in blockchains and cryptocurrencies, with much, much fewer resources than had previously been established. Those resources include the time that it would take to do so and the number of qubits (or quantum bits) that it would have to use.
This cryptography is very central to not just cryptocurrencies, but more broadly to cryptography on the internet. It is also used for secure web connections between web browsers and web servers. Versions of elliptic curve cryptography are used in national security systems and military encryption. It’s very prevalent and pervasive in all modern networks and protocols.
And not only was this paper improving the algorithms, but there was also a concurrent paper showing that the hardware itself was substantially improved. The claim here was that the number of physical qubits needed to achieve a certain kind of logical qubit was also greatly reduced. These two kinds of improvements are compounding upon each other. It’s a kind of a win-win situation from the quantum computing perspective, but a lose-lose situation for cryptography.
IEEE Spectrum: What do Google AI’s findings mean for cryptocurrencies and the broader cybersecurity ecosystem?
Peikert: There’s always been this looming threat in the distance of quantum computers breaking a large fraction of the cryptography that’s used throughout the cryptocurrency ecosystem. And I think what this paper did was really the loudest alarm yet that these kinds of quantum attacks might not be as far off as some have suspected, or hoped, in recent years. It’s caused a reevaluation across the industry, and a moving up of the timeline for when quantum computers might be capable of breaking this cryptography.
When we think about the timelines and when it’s important to have completed these transitions [to post-quantum cryptography], we also need to factor in the unknown improvements that we should expect to see in the coming years. The science of quantum computing will not stay static, and there will be these further breakthroughs. We can’t say exactly what they will be or when they will come, but you can bet that they will be coming.
IEEE Spectrum: What is your guess on if or when quantum computers will be able to break cryptography in the real world?
Peikert: Instead of thinking about a specific date when we expect them to come, we have to think about the probabilities and the risks as time goes on. There have been huge breakthrough developments, including not only this paper, but also some last year. But even with these, I think that the chance of a cryptographic attack by quantum computers being successful in the next three years is extremely low, maybe less than a percent. But then, as you get out to several years, like five, six, or 10 years, one has to seriously consider a probability, maybe 5 percent or 10 percent or more. So it’s still rather small, but significant enough that we have to worry about the risk, because the value that is protected by this kind of cryptography is really enormous.
The U.S. government has put 2035 as its target for migrating all of the national security systems to post-quantum cryptography. That seems like a prudent date, given the timelines that it takes to upgrade cryptography. It’s a slow process. It has to be done very deliberately and carefully to make sure that you’re not introducing new vulnerabilities, that you’re not making mistakes, that everything still works properly. So, you know, given the outlook for quantum computers on the horizon, it’s really important that we prepare now, or ideally, yesterday, or a few years ago, for that kind of transition.
IEEE Spectrum: Are there significant roadblocks you see to industrial adoption of post-quantum cryptography going forward?
Peikert: Cryptography is very hard to change. We’ve only had one or maybe two major transitions in cryptography since the early 1980s or late 1970s, when the field first was invented. We don’t really have a systematic way of transitioning cryptography.
An additional challenge is that the performance trade-offs are very different in post-quantum cryptography than they are in the legacy systems. Keys and cipher texts and digital signatures are all significantly larger in post-quantum cryptography, but the computations are actually faster, typically. People have optimized cryptography for speed in the past, and we have very good fast speeds now for post-quantum cryptography, but the sizes of the keys are a challenge.
Especially in blockchain applications, like cryptocurrencies, space on the blockchain is at a premium. So it calls for a reevaluation in many applications of how we integrate the cryptography into the system, and that work is ongoing. And, the blockchain ecosystem uses a lot of advanced cryptography, exotic things like zero-knowledge proofs. In many cases, we have rudimentary constructions of these fancy cryptography tools from post-quantum-type mathematics, but they’re not nearly as mature and industry-ready as the legacy systems that have been deployed. It continues to be an important technical challenge to develop post-quantum versions of these very fancy cryptographic schemes that are used in cutting-edge applications.
IEEE Spectrum: As an academic cryptography researcher, what attracted you to work with a cryptocurrency, and Algorand in particular?
Peikert: My former Ph.D. advisor is Silvio Micali, the inventor of Algorand. The system is very elegant. It is a very high-performing blockchain system, and it uses very little energy, has fast transaction finalization, and a number of other great features. And Silvio appreciated that this quantum threat was real and was coming, and the team approached me about helping to improve the Algorand protocol at the basic levels to become more post-quantum secure in 2021. That was a very exciting opportunity, because it was a difficult engineering and scientific challenge to integrate post-quantum cryptography into all the different technical and cryptographic mechanisms that were underlying the protocol.
IEEE Spectrum: What is the current status of post-quantum cryptography in Algorand, and blockchains in general?
Peikert: We’ve identified some of the most pressing issues and worked our way through some of them, but it’s a many-faceted problem overall. We started with the integrity of the chain itself, which is the transaction history that everybody has to agree upon.
Our first major project was developing a system that would add post-quantum security to the history of the chain. We developed a system called state proofs for that, which is a mixture of ordinary post-quantum cryptography and also some more fancy cryptography: It’s a way of taking a large number of signatures and digesting them down into a much smaller number of signatures, while still being confident that these large number of signatures actually exist and are properly formed. We also followed it with other papers and projects that are about adding post-quantum cryptography and security to other aspects of the blockchain in the Algorand ecosystem.
It’s not a complete project yet. We don’t claim to be fully post-quantum secure. That’s a very challenging target to hit, and there are aspects that we will continue to work on into the near future.
IEEE Spectrum: In your view, will we adopt post-quantum cryptography before the risks actually catch up with us?
Peikert: I tend to be an optimist about these things. I think that it’s a very good thing that more people in decision-making roles are recognizing that this is an important topic, and that these kinds of migrations have to be done. I think that we can’t be complacent about it, and we can’t kick the can down the road much longer. But I do see that the focus is being put on this important problem, so I’m optimistic that most important systems will eventually have good either mitigations or full migrations in place.
But it’s also a point on the horizon that we don’t know exactly when it will come. So, there is the possibility that there is a huge breakthrough, and we have many fewer years than we might have hoped for, and that we don’t get all the systems upgraded that we would like to have fixed by the time quantum computers arrive.
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