Joe Biden and his administration seems be on a forward thinking gear for quantum technology linked cyber attacks leading to data breaches. On December 21st,2022, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to prevent data breaches emerging from quantum computing.
The Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act was made into a legislation that prevents usage of quantum computing technology in decrypting stolen information, as they can break any kind of cryptographic algorithms.
The latest bill also urges companies to maintain an inventory of all their IT assets that are vulnerable to quantum enabled data breaches and must maintain a progress sheet on migrating the digital infrastructure to post quantum cryptography.
Except for the National Security Systems, all other federal agencies are required to follow the inventory and the post quantum cryptography standards prescribed by NIST. And from May 2023, they need to follow guidelines prescribed for migration by Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
NOTE 1- According to a discussion on Reddit, a 128 bit encryption standard can take at least 3 months to break and a 256-bit key might take even longer. However, AES 256 is believed to be quantum resistant, as it can yield many brute force iterations.
NOTE 2- All these days, we were worried about protecting computer networks from cyber warfare. Now, security researchers are encouraging IT engineers to develop an infrastructure that is of quantum proof.
Perhaps it’s high- time to think about the deployment of quantum proof encryption on servers storing and processing financial, healthcare, retail and manufacturing info….isn’t it?
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