Cryptologist Tanja Lange of Eindhoven University of Technology warns about the effect that quantum computers can have on data security. Encryption that is currently not fast enough to crack will be easier to crack with quantum computers.
According to the article in Nature by Lange and her American colleague Daniel Bernstein of the University of Illinois, researchers are working on better encryption, but that requires a lot of bandwidth and that is a major drawback for implementation.
According to Lange, that implementation must start quickly, because it can take 15 to 20 years after the encryption technique has been created before it is in general use. Quantum computers are still in their infancy, but the technology could be a lot more mature in eight to ten years.
If malicious parties can gain access to quantum computers, they can decrypt much of the information that is now securely encrypted. This means that a lot of information that must remain secret, including private data in, for example, medical records and financial databases, suddenly becomes accessible information. The plea to quickly introduce better encryption is not new. Lange has been warning against it for more than ten years, and other scientists have been calling for this for some time.