Rep. McCaul: US Must Gain Decryption Edge

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCall is calling on Congress to increase spending on #quantumcomputing research to ensure that the United States is the first nation to employ quantum computing as a tool to decrypt data. "We can't lose this one to the Chinese," he says. #Google #Dwave

Speaking at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce cybersecurity summit Sept. 27, McCaul, R-Texas, noted: "If China develops quantum computing first, it would be a national security disaster. If we want to be first in this area, the federal government has to be driving this."

McCaul compared the quantum computing race to the space race in which the United States landed the first person on the moon. "We want to be first in this; it's really important," he said.

A Long-Term Effort
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has begun work on quantum computing, which could be applied to crack current approaches to cryptography (see Tackling Quantum Computing Threats to Cryptography).

Quantum computers will make use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to process information at speeds exponentially greater than today's devices. Such processing speeds, in theory, could easily break the massively long strings of numbers used in today's encryption software.

Work on refining cryptography so it's effective in the era of quantum computing must start now because "it will take 10 to 20 years to get new algorithms selected, standardized and implemented out into the field," says NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who co-authored a NIST report on post-quantum cryptography.

http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/rep-mccaul-us-must-gain-decryption-edge-a-9422