‘The fixes are architectural, not bigger pipes’: OpenSSL President on what businesses can expect and how to prepare for a post-quantum internet

Knowing what ‘quantum’ is and why it affects the internet may not be something most people understand.

How a physics concept changes the security of the internet isn’t really at the forefront of most people’s worries.

But the change is already happening.

The internet is preparing for a post-quantum world that renders much of the encryption the world has relied on obsolete.

To understand just how powerful post-quantum decryption is, think of enigma: an encryption machine that took the entire secret operation of Bletchley park over a year to crack would be solved almost instantly.

For today’s standard public-key encryption algorithms, it's a matter of days or hours.

By some estimates, the viability of quantum computers capable of this level of decryption are still several years away.

But preparations are already happening - and not just by the good guys.

How the good guys and bad guys are preparing for Q-Day Given that quantum computers capable of decrypting the current algorithms many businesses rely on today are all but inevitable, hackers have begun stealing troves of files that they cannot currently crack but will have huge value once commercially available quantum computers become available.

To get ahead of the curve, governance bodies have begun introducing regulations to ensure businesses and services are fully protected ahead of time, using longer, more robust encryption methods that can hold up against the quantum threat.

But the shift to protecting against quantum threats introduces new problems for the wider internet.

Longer signatures during exchanges add to congestion, and when multiplied by the millions of terabytes of data transferred across the internet each day, this could compound into a serious logistical problem if the necessary steps are not taken.

OpenSSL is one of the world's most widely deployed open source cryptographic libraries.

It has been developing open-source post-quantum cryptography to help secure businesses (and the internet) in the billions of secure online interactions that happen every day.