Quantum computing will cripple encryption methods within decade, spy agency chie
Source: Ian MacLeod
The head of Canada’s electronic spy agency warned Friday the advent of super-fast quantum computers will cripple current encryption methods for securing sensitive government and personal information within a decade.
In a rare public speech, Greta Bossenmaier, chief of the Communications Security Establishment, said cryptologists at the CSE and around the world are racing to find new cryptographic standards before Y2Q – years to quantum – predicted for 2026.
She is the third senior CSE official this week to warn publicly of the threat quantum computing poses to widely used public key cryptography (PKC), protecting sensitive data transmissions from hackers, hacktivists, foreign state spies and other malicious actors.
The CSE is best known as a spy agency — it collects, decrypts and analyzes phone calls, faxes, emails, tweets, satellite and other electronic signals emanating from adversarial foreign nations and overseas threat actors. But it’s also mandated to protect government computer systems and networks, and the information they carry.
Already, federal computer systems are “probed” more than 100 million time a day by suspected malicious actors searching for vulnerabilities.
Potentially every Canadian citizen could be vulnerable
Now, “the challenge of protecting systems is about to get a lot harder thanks to quantum computing,” Bossenmaier told an Ottawa conference of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.
“Nearly every company, nearly every organization, nearly every government currently employs some form of encryption,” she said. “It’s also part of almost every Canadians’ daily life, whether we know it or not. Our credit cards, debit cards, work and building passes, just to name a few examples, all work on some form of encryption.
“It’s not really a question of if, it’s a question of when. The clock has started to tick. So unless we collectively get ahead of the quantum challenge and rethink encryption, the systems and information of companies, of governments, of organizations, of citizens — potentially every Canadian citizen — could be vulnerable.”
Her warnings follow remarks Monday by David Sabourin, CSE’s manager of cryptographic security.
He told a Toronto conference on quantum-safe computing if the 2026 Y2Q prediction holds, “we’re in trouble,” according to an IT World Canada report.
Scott Jones, CSE’s deputy chief of IT security, responsible for securing federal information systems, reportedly told the gathering, “I think we are already behind.”
Quantum computing is based on quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that explores and explains the set of laws governing the atomic and subatomic world of atoms, electrons, photons and other particles. While traditional computers use long strings of bits to encode either a zero or a one, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits.
Two remarkable properties of qubits – the ability to be in multiple states at the same time (superposition) and the phenomenon in which pairs or groups of qubits can only be described in relation to one another even if they’re on opposite sides of the universe (entanglement) – allow quantum computing to be exponentially faster and more capable at factoring very large numbers, which is the basis of current cryptology.
Today’s computers simply can’t solve what amounts to mathematical problems blocking unauthorized access to encrypted information. But the immense processing power of quantum computers will someday, rendering current PKC ineffective, if not useless.
Yet, as Bossenmaier noted, once the new class of technology becomes a commercial reality, it promises tremendous opportunities that could result in significant advances in science, medicine and engineering.
In April, the Toronto Star obtained a CSE memo discussing how to defend against the quantum threat. The document did not make it clear if the organization also is exploring quantum technology to decrypt intercepted computer communications, the newspaper said.
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