The Bridge Builders and Fixers of the Cyber Age
The Bridge Builders and Fixers of the Cyber Age
Just imagine you are a bridge engineer, and you have learnt all the required maths and methodologies — and practice your art in building amazing bridges. You understand all the maths related to stresses and strains and in the materials you have used. Your art is based on hundreds of years of advancement, and all the textbooks define the same methods.
But then, something comes along to show that all the bridges you have built are weak and are likely to fall down in the next few years. All of the textbooks must now be removed from the shelves, as they outline dangerous and now unproven methods.
You must now get rid of all the things you have learnt and never use those methods again, and learn a whole lot of new methods of building bridges — while securing all your existing bridges.
And, to make things worse, you must continue to support traffic and pedestrians over your bridges as you radically change their designs as they travel over them. If any of the bridges fail while you fix them, it is likely to bring major losses. But, if you don’t manage to fix them all, then all the bridges will fall at the same time in the future, and where you have no idea when they will actually fall.
This is the worrying (and exciting) new world of Post Quantum Cryptography. All of the methods we have used to secure the Internet will fail when quantum computers are built at scale — but we have no idea when they will fail. Be ready to deprecate nearly every part of trust on the Internet and replace them with new methods — and where we must fix this as we continue to use the Internet.
Like it or not, you can’t just put a roadblock on the Internet — it is just too important for that. For us, it will be like fixing the engine of a speeding car — while it travels at full speed along a motorway.
Exciting and scary times ahead!
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