One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the worldâs secrets. Your secrets.
Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Dayâthe day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanityâs intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system.
âWeâre kind of playing Russian roulette,â says Michele Mosca, who coauthored the most recent âQuantum Threat Timelineâ report from the Global Risk Institute, which estimates how long we have left. âYouâll probably win if you only play once, but itâs not a good game to play.â When Mosca and his colleagues surveyed cybersecurity experts last year, the forecast was sobering: a one-in-three chance that Q-Day happens before 2035. And the chances it has already happened in secret? Some people I spoke to estimated 15 percentâabout the same as youâd get from one spin of the revolver cylinder.
The corporate AI wars may have stolen headlines in recent years, but the quantum arms race has been heating up too. Where todayâs AI pushes the limits of classical computingâthe kind that runs on 0s and 1sâquantum technology represents an altogether different form of computing. By harnessing the spooky mechanics of the subatomic world, it can run on 0s, 1s, or anything in between. This makes quantum computers pretty terrible at, say, storing data but potentially very good at, say, finding the recipe for a futuristic new material (or your email password). The classical machine is doomed to a life of stepwise calculation: Try one set of ingredients, fail, scrap everything, try again. But quantum computers can explore many potential recipes simultaneously.
So, naturally, tech giants such as Google, Huawei, IBM, and Microsoft have been chasing quantumâs myriad positive applicationsânot only for materials science but also communications, drug development, and market analysis. China is plowing vast resources into state-backed efforts, and both the US and the European Union have pledged millions in funding to support homegrown quantum industries. Of course, whoever wins the race wonât just have the next great engine of world-saving innovation. Theyâll also have the greatest code-breaking machine in history. So itâs normal to wonder: What kind of Q-Day will humanity getâand is there anything we can do to prepare?
If you had a universal picklock, you might tell everyoneâor you might keep it hidden in your pocket for as long as you possibly could. From a typical personâs vantage point, maybe Q-Day wouldnât be recognizable as Q-Day at all. Maybe it would look like a series of strange and apparently unconnected news stories spread out over months or years. Londonâs energy grid goes down on election day, plunging the city into darkness. A US submarine on a covert mission surfaces to find itself surrounded by enemy ships. Embarrassing material starts to show up online in greater and greater quantities: classified intelligence cables, presidential cover-ups, billionairesâ dick pics. In this scenario, it might be decades before weâre able to pin down exactly when Q-Day actually happened.
Then again, maybe the holder of the universal picklock prefers the disaster-movie outcome: everything, everywhere, all at once. Destroy the grid. Disable the missile silos. Take down the banking system. Open all the doors and let the secrets out.
