Quantum computers threaten to end digital security. Here’s what’s being done about it

For much of the past decade, cybersecurity experts have been warning of a looming threat: the advent of quantum computers.

These machines, which use principles of quantum physics to represent information, will one day be powerful enough to crack the most widely used encryption systems, rendering almost all digital communication insecure.

The question has always been exactly when that day would arrive. The most common digital encryption technique, RSA, which was invented in 1977, is based on multiplying two large prime numbers. One way to break it is to figure out what those two large primes were. In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor invented an algorithm, that if run on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, would easily find these two primes....

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