The insurance industry has to prepare for the encryption risks presented by quantum computers. Although the technology perpetually seems to be ‘five years away,’ it has the potential to undermine the public-key cryptography that fundamentally supports encryption systems for digital commerce, banking, and insurance.
Modern cryptography is built on complex mathematical equations that would take conventional computers millions of years to solve, but quantum computers could solve them exponentially faster, making them a threat to current data encryption methods.
Q-Day is the hypothetical day when this risk turns from a theoretical one that’s years away to a real and active threat to public-key cryptography. With encryption built into identity systems, secure email, virtual private networks, and numerous public-key infrastructure systems, Q-Day represents a nigh-existential threat to the U.S.
The insurance market may not be exactly sure when Q-Day will be, but the potential risk to a critical piece of infrastructure is clearly apparent, especially considering the quantum computing advances made in recent months.
A prototype quantum computer built in June by researchers from the University of Chicago alongside American tech firm IBM had notably fewer errors. IBM also announced two months later that the quantum computing advances it had made could open the door to larger and much more robust quantum systems.
The technology is still a long way from breaking current encryption systems, but it has demonstrated clear forward momentum that the insurance industry simply cannot ignore. At some point in the future, quantum computing will be powerful enough to break RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and elliptic curve cryptography.
Shor’s algorithm, the quantum computing algorithm that undermines public-key encryption systems like RSA by making the complex mathematical problems that underpin them tractable, needs significant scale, circuit depth, and error correction. Tech firms and researchers still have a long road ahead of them before software and hardware line up enough for quantum computing to present an active risk, rather than a hypothetical one that’s only predicted to happen.
However, bad actors are already making moves under the assumption that quantum computing technology will mature in the foreseeable future by intercepting and storing encrypted traffic, and then waiting for quantum computers that can break standard encryption.
Insurance data is particularly at risk because it can stay relevant for over 5 years. According to a survey of a thousand cybersecurity and IT experts by DigiCert, nearly 90% of the participants have started planning, experimenting with, and launching post-quantum cryptography, with 39% expecting to make a total transition over the next 5 years.
While enterprises like D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) are working hard to bring quantum computing into reality, the post-quantum threat landscape is already giving cybersecurity experts sleepless nights. This illustrates the duality of most things: everything good comes with drawbacks that have to be addressed so that the benefits can transform lives.
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