Jeffery DelViscio: Quantum and cryptography: those are two words that might strike fear in the minds of the uninitiated. But in February’s issue of Scientific American, we have a story about how they’re colliding—double whammy.
Here to walk us through it is Kelsey Houston-Edwards. Kelsey is a mathematician and journalist. She formerly wrote and hosted the online show PBS Infinite Series. And she wrote this story, called “Tomorrow’s Quantum Computers Threaten Today’s Secrets. Here’s How to Protect Them.”
Welcome to Science, Quickly, Kelsey.
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Kelsey Houston-Edwards: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
DelViscio: Okay. Let’s jump right into this mathematical quantum tension. How is quantum computing an issue for cryptography?
Houston-Edwards: So cryptography is the art of sending messages in a way that someone in between cannot read them—that only the sender and receiver can read them. And there are essentially two different ways that this is done right now.
And the first one is: A sender and receiver have the same key, and they use that key to lock and unlock a box. And the message is securely locked in the box in between. The problem with this type of cryptography is that the sender and receiver of the secret message need to have the same key beforehand. It doesn’t work if the sender and receiver have never spoken before.
So if you want to securely send your credit card information to maybe a clothing store online that you have no prior contact with, you don’t have that secret key with them. You need to use something that’s called public-key cryptography that’s done entirely in the open. And it’s always done between two parties with no prior communication.
And that type of…
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