A Survey of Encryption Standard and Potential Impact Due to Quantum Computing

The Intelligence Community, DOD, financial, and commercial entities rely on encryption to protect its most sensitive information. Public Key Encryption (PKE) method is used to encrypt information using the principle that it is difficult to factor a very large number into its primes unless one has access to a private key that was used to encrypt the information. Using this technology, decrypting a message using a 128-bit long key would take a classical supercomputer about 1 billion billion years to decrypt. However, in the mid-1990s, mathematicians Shor and Grover developed algorithms that have proved to be efficient in factoring large numbers into primes using a quantum computer. The development of quantum hardware and algorithms therefore threaten encryption protection. In 2019, Google announced that it established quantum supremacy, meaning that its quantum computer solved a problem that no classical computer could. The authors of this paper conducted a study to describe the latest encryption research and development, methods used, and the potential vulnerability due to quantum computing. The authors further established the timeframes in which pre-quantum encryption method will become vulnerable under three scenarios. All the research for this study was derived from unclassified open source materials.