How Can Quantum Computing Break Today's Cryptography?
Roger A. Grimes · 2019
This chapter covers how quantum computing is likely capable of breaking most forms of traditional public key encryption. It begins by discussing cryptography basics, paying particular attention to how most of today's public key encryption schemes provide protection. Cryptography basics cover digital encryption, authentication, and integrity hashing basics. The major cryptographic functions of symmetric ciphers, asymmetric ciphers, and integrity hashing functions provide a wide range of services to the computer world, and by extension, to the real world. Common cryptographic uses include the following: encryption, authentication and digital signing. Quantum computers are capable of breaking many forms of traditional cryptography because of their inherent quantum properties coupled with quantum algorithms, which take advantage of those properties and shortcut the math. Quantum computers and quantum properties cannot magically break every known cryptography cipher. They can break only ciphers that rely on particular functions that are susceptible to quantum properties and quantum algorithms for their protections.