IBM warns that Quantum Computing will lead to a catastrophic event in cybersecurity.

An executive from International Business Machines Corp. has stated that governments and businesses are ill-equipped to handle the chaos that quantum computers will bring to cybersecurity by the end of the decade. Ana Paula Assis, IBM’s general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa, expressed her concerns about the potential for a cybersecurity catastrophe caused by quantum technology during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She firmly believes that this scenario is inevitable.

Quantum computers, a new technology that greatly accelerates processing power by performing calculations in parallel rather than sequentially, will render existing encryption systems obsolete. IBM has developed many fundamental technologies for the quantum era, which Assisi says could arrive by 2030.

Some governments are beginning to take the threat seriously. In a rare unanimous vote, the US Senate passed a bill in 2022 addressing the threat of quantum computers in cryptography.

Companies are not ready to use quantum machines or cope with the disruptions they cause, CEO Jack Hidary said at the panel.

Most “companies don’t yet have a solid roadmap for how they’re going to use AI and quantum together to solve core problems,” Hidary said.

He said a “train wreck” is developing, estimating that it will take eight to 10 years for banks to switch to quantum protocols, while scalable quantum computers will be available by 2029 or 2030. Everything that uses encryption, from online shopping to online banking, is at risk, according to Hidary.

Other information about the panel:

• China is doing “very serious and very confident work in many ways” on quantum computing, ETH Zurich president Joel Mesot said.
• States may be better able to regulate quantum computers than artificial intelligence because the technology is so dependent on infrastructure, according to Mesot. “I would be more optimistic that we can regulate this better than AI,” he said.
• Quantum computing is developing faster than predicted, Hidary said.
• Two-thirds of developers using quantum computers rely on IBM’s open-source toolkit Qiskit to write their code, according to Assisi.

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