Preparing your organization for the quantum future

Preparing your organization for the quantum future Beyond a simple update Your upstream dependencies Industry must draw a line in the sand to move forward from Understanding how and where you use cryptography Expect a hybrid transition A business imperative, not just a technical challenge Conclusion Red Hat Product Security About the author Emily Fox More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share Recently, we’ve shared a lot about post-quantum cryptography, the great work we’re doing to make it available to you through our products , and the importance of preparing for a future with quantum computers powerful enough to break classic RSA -based cryptography. You may have heard about “Q-day,” the day when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) is available to break public-key encryption–the underpinning of our digital world today. If you missed it, this risk is real, and proactive organizations are already preparing for it. Q-day is predicted to occur between 2029 and 2032, so now is the time to prepare. The core issue at hand is that many of our current cryptographic systems, like RSA, rely on mathematical problems that are simple for classical computers to do in one direction, but extremely difficult to reverse. For example, multiplying 2 large prime numbers is simple, but factoring the result back to its original prime numbers is very hard. This is modern public-key cryptography, also called asymmetric cryptography. In contrast, symmetric cryptography relies on a single shared secret key for both encryption and decryption and requires a secure method for sharing that secret key beforehand. With public-key cryptography being the most common and practical way for computers to share that secret, we must also be aware that CRQCs can weaken the effectiveness of symmetric keys in addition to compromising the most common method by which those keys are shared. CRQCs can do factoring at a scale and speed that is impossible with existing computers. Instead of multiple lifetimes, RSA can be broken in seconds. New cryptographic algorithms are needed to resist these new attacks, and those new algorithms (e.