Eric Schmidt about Quantum Computing implications on security

Episode 4 - Quantum Technology Explained series

"You have time now, you do not have time in the future" - Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and Chairman, in relation to quantum computing and information security.

It has been assumed for ten years that the ability to break prime factorization, which is at the core of RSA, will allow basically "store now and decrypt later", which is what people are doing, to enable it.

My guess is that's going to happen regardless of what we do, so I strongly would say to our audience that now is the time to change your encryption from the RSA standards from 30 years ago, and they did well for us, to new emerging NIST standards that are quantum essentially resistant. As far as we can tell, these new solutions, which are available now, are not breakable by quantum, by quantum mechanisms.

The reason you should act now, for example, is because we know that foreign powers, and I won't go into the details, are busy recording everything. And it is their plan, ten years ago, ten years from now, to decrypt everything. I'd rather get the stuff encrypted now, stop the current leakage, if you will, of future encrypted data. I'd like to get it fixed now. A number of companies are now working on how to combine RSA and these more powerful tools. It's right at the edge, and I strongly encourage the audience to take this seriously. You have time now. You don't have time in the future!

So, get your act together around this, I'm sorry to be so blunt. Security matters a lot on these always-on networks. And here's something that you can do now to prepare for a very likely future and maybe ten plus years. This speech is the excerpt from the interview Eric Schmidt gave at the Q2B conference in December 2020 organised by QCWare (q2b.qcware.com).

Post your questions in the comments below. Contact Alexey Bocharnikov if you have any questions.

Link to episode 3.