On Tuesday, Sameh Soucy, chief of staff at France’s cybersecurity agency ANSI, announced that it will stop certifying security products without quantum-resistant encryption from 2027, according to a Reuters report on the France quantum conference. Susi said businesses should be purchasing quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI certification is required for implementation by government and other critical infrastructure operators. Reuters said the move would result in legacy systems being phased out.
“This move is very timely,” theoretical computer scientist Bill Fefferman told Gizmodo. “As a society, we cannot delay implementing post-quantum encryption; the risks of inaction are too severe, and the timeline for building quantum computers at large scale is too uncertain.”
Harvest now, decrypt later
For context, Q-Day refers to the quantum encryption apocalypse—a milestone at which quantum hardware becomes capable of running algorithms that “unscramble” the encryption framework that protects sensitive information. These encryption algorithms protect our bank transactions, medical records, government communications, corporate secrets, and much more. But as things stand, these algorithms may not be ready for Q-day. And if things don’t change, all this personal information could fall into the hands of malicious entities. Quantum computers, unlike classical computers, use the strange rules of quantum mechanics to solve problems with extreme efficiency, potentially making them far more capable than conventional computers of cracking some forms of encryption.
To be clear, the current technology is not yet fully developed. But when Gizmodo asked experts about preparing for Q-Day, they generally agreed it’s never too early to start preparing. For example, Henry Yuen of Columbia University said that, if we cannot be overly confident that encryption-breaking algorithms will not come in the next five years, then we need to “move with great urgency.”
And there is still a lot of work to be done with respect to current post-quantum cryptographic schemes, Fefferman pointed out. For example, current cryptographic schemes have been studied for decades, while post-quantum schemes “are based on new mathematical assumptions and have received little investigation.”
Another concern presented by Suissi at the France Quantum Conference was “hack now and decrypt later” attacks. In this scenario, attackers “harvest” the encrypted information, which will no longer be accessible to them. However, this will happen only if future quantum algorithms are able to decrypt it.
the market reacts
Big players from the industry immediately expressed their views at the conference. Speaking to Reuters, Fanny Bouton, head of quantum at French cloud computing firm OVHCloud, said the industry faces a “double compliance burden” in “auditing our products and securing all the data we have to meet ANSI requirements.”
According to Quantum Insider, France is one of the largest investors in quantum technologies, with national plans valued at around $3.5 billion (€3 billion). France is also part of the G7 cybersecurity working group, which recently issued a statement on quantum security last month.
Accordingly, businesses, banks and public services must consider how to transition in the wake of a rapidly growing “substantial” industry, Pascal Brier, chief innovation officer at French IT company Capgemini, told Reuters. During the conference, Jerry Chou of IBM Quantum said that quantum threats could emerge by the mid-2030s. French quantum computing company QPerfect said the blockchain standard elliptic curve digital signature algorithm could be one of the first systems to be cracked.
But still, the challenges are real. As Fefferman explained to Gizmodo, many post-quantum schemes involve “tradeoffs in performance, memory usage, or key and signature size that may complicate deployment in real-world systems.”
He said that to safely migrate existing infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography, protocols, software, hardware and standards would have to be updated – while ensuring that stuff doesn’t leak out during that process.
“This is not just a technical issue,” Soucy said. “It is a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation and sovereignty.”
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