How Quantum Computers Will Break Your Phone’s Encryption
By: Mark Dodds
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Security, Crypto

These days all your devices are encrypted. Apple boasts about their secure systems, most companies have encrypted servers, even your own laptop probably has some level on encryption going on. However, all of these systems are subject to fault. Of course, this all depends on the type of encryption you’re using. While many agree that the standard is and should be AES, there are a lot of other encryption protocols out there, some of which are still in use today. One of the other main algorithms still circulating the globe is the RSA algorithm. In order to understand why, we have to go back to before its time, to the beginnings of modern cryptography.

In the beginning, there were two…

Known mostly within the American cryptologist worlds, Martin Hellman was the more academic of the two. After having received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1969, he joined the teaching staff in the electrical engineering department, where he still teaches today.

The second person was Bailey Whitfield Diffie, who could be considered more of your stereotypical revolutionist. After he had attained a Bachelor of a Science from M.I.T in 1965, Diffie worked as a researcher in Boston and Stanford. After 8 years, and a growing interest in cryptography and computer security, he decided to pursue his research full time with the help of his future wife, Mary Fischer.

In the summer of 1974, Diffie and Fischer met with a friend at the Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in New York, which housed one of the only non-governmental cryptographic research groups in the United States at the time. While the director couldn’t say much due to secrecy orders, he advised Diffie to meet with Hellman, who was teaching at Stanford while also pursuing a cryptographic research team. A planned half-hour meeting between the two turned into many hours of shared ideas and information. In order to continue their blossoming partnership, Hellman hired Diffie under the university as a grant-funded part-time research programmer for the 1975 spring term. For the next year, the pair attended multiple difference conferences on cryptology and even criticized the NBS proposed Data Encryption Standard for potential security risks (including a key length of only 56-bits). Then in 1976, the two first proposed the idea of an asymmetric public-private key cryptosystem. Their system used a shared-secret-key created from exponentiation of some number, modulo a prime number.

Then there were three more…

Despite leaving the problem of realizing a one-way function open, Diffie and Hellman laid the groundwork which would allow others to go down in computer science history.

Two researchers at M.I.T first caught wind of the proposal of a public-private key system and set to the task of discovering the missing ingredient. Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, along with fellow cryptographer Leonard Adleman, made several attempts over the course of a year to create the proposed “one-way function” required to implement the algorithm. Rivest and Shamir, as the computer scientists, proposed many potential functions, while Adleman was responsible for finding their weakness, as he was the mathematician of the group. They tried many approaches including “knapsack-based” and “permutation polynomials”. For a time, they even thought that what was need would be impossible to obtain due to the conflicting restraints.

L2R: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Len Adleman (2003). Image from https://www.usc.edu

Then in April 1977, the trio was spending the night at a students house when Rivest was unable to sleep, and so proceeded to lay on the couch with a math textbook and again begin pondering their one-way function. After an apparent eureka moment, he spent the rest of the night formalizing his idea and supposedly had much of the paper ready by daybreak. When the trio published the paper of the discovery in August of 1977, with the name RSA for the initials of their last names, they tried to patent it throughout the globe. However, since the paper had already been published at the time of application, the United States was the only country to grant the patent for a “Cryptographic communications system and method” in 1983. 17 years later (when the patent expired), the algorithm was officially released to the public domain by RSA Security on September 6th, 2000.