The White House is significantly shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that would withstand attacks using quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments and most individuals on Earth.
The executive order, titled Protecting the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, requires computing systems for “high-value assets” and “high-impact systems” to transition to post-quantum cryptographic key establishment schemes by December 31, 2030, and quantum-secure digital signature schemes by December 31, 2031.
deal with a significant threat
The new deadline, which is about five years earlier than previous times for many organizations, comes after recent research showed that the resources and costs required to build a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are much lower than previous consensus estimates. In response, Google, Cloudflare and other companies recently tightened their deadline to remove the vulnerable system to 2029.
“The advent of large-scale quantum computers, particularly in the hands of adversaries, will pose a significant threat to widely used cryptographic security systems,” Monday’s executive order said. “Ongoing cyber activity against our nation also poses a risk for adversaries to collect information on the United States now and decrypt it later if quantum computers are operational on a large scale.”
Under a timeline published by the National Security Agency in 2022, “national security systems” – a category including only defense and intelligence systems under the agency’s authority – were ordered to be quantum-ready between 2030 and 2033. Most other organizations had until 2035 to complete the transition. Now, many of them will need to make changes very quickly.
“So, for any systems that fall into this new category of high-value assets and high-impact systems, their transition timeline has been shortened by 4-5 years (from 2035 to 2030/2031),” Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Forecaster Consulting Group, told Ars. “This is a significant reduction in the transition timeline for these systems, and it follows similar timeline revisions from Google and Cloudflare that we announced in late March/early April.”
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