OTTAWA — The head of Canada’s electronic spy agency warned Friday the advent of super-fast quantum computers will cripple current encryption methods for securing sensitive government and personal information within a decade. She is the third senior CSE official this week to warn publicly of the threat quantum computing poses to widely used public key cryptography (PKC), protecting sensitive data transmissions from hackers, hacktivists, foreign state spies and other malicious actors. While traditional computers use long strings of bits to encode either a zero or a one, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits. But the immense processing power of quantum computers will someday, rendering current PKC ineffective, if not useless. In April, the Toronto Star obtained a CSE memo discussing how to defend against the quantum threat.

Source: National Post September 23, 2016 21:45 UTC