QUANTUM REALITIESOur Online World Relies on Encryption. What Happens If It Fails?

By Maureen Stanton

In our hyper-connected world, we rely on encrypted communications every day—to shop online, digitally sign documents, make bank transactions, check our steps on fitness trackers.

But today’s encryption, which transforms data into unreadable formats to keep our information secure, is under intense pressure. Cybercriminals are increasingly sophisticated, and our networks—woven with cloud services and third-party platforms—are more vulnerable than ever. JP Morgan reports it repels 45 billion hacking attempts a day.

The most significant threat is something called Y2Q or Q-Day: the date quantum computers will make most current encryption methods obsolete. To grasp the scale, a quantum computer could do in a day what the world’s current fastest supercomputer would need millennia to accomplish: break RSA-2048 encryption, an algorithm that’s the backbone of internet security. It’s not an overstatement to say that, without encryption, the entire security of our connected world would collapse, threatening the stability of society. While Y2Q may be years away, there is also a growing need to boost the resilience of encryption. “Harvest now, decrypt later” attacks are escalating—a strategy where cybercriminals harvest encrypted data today with the intent of decrypting it later when quantum tools become available.

To address these challenges, a Boston University–led multidisciplinary research team, supported by a $3.6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Growing Convergence Research award, is developing a groundbreaking, physics-inspired approach to data security and privacy. Their method reimagines the very foundations of encryption tools and they say it promises to be more robust, scalable, and future-ready in the face of rapidly evolving cyber threats. The team, which includes collaborators at Cornell University and the University of Central Florida, has just published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that illustrates some of the ideas driving its approach to cryptography.

“We’re in a new era of technology, where the frontiers of computational capability lie at the intersection of classical and quantum computing, AI, and data security,” says principal investigator Andrei Ruckenstein, a BU College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics. “The most urgent and complex challenges in these areas, such as safeguarding sensitive data or preparing for the quantum threat, cannot be solved by current encryption and security methods. What’s exciting about this work is that it introduces a true paradigm shift and provides new capabilities made possible only through diverse disciplines forging a fundamental change in thinking.”