The quest for quantum-proof encryption just made a leap forward

The issue: Many of the things you do online every day are protected by encryption so that no one else can spy on it. Your online banking and messages to friends are likely encrypted, for example—as are government secrets. But that protection is under threat from the development of quantum computers, which threaten to render modern encryption methods useless. 

Getting ahead of the game: While modern encryption is still a long way from being broken, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology launched a competition in 2016 to develop new standards for cryptography that will be more quantum-proof. Winners won’t be announced until 2022, but last week the organization announced that it had narrowed the initial field of 69 contenders down to just 15. 

A promising method: So far, a single approach to “post-quantum cryptography” accounts for the majority of the finalists: lattice-based cryptography. While public-key encryption uses traditional math to encode data, lattice-based cryptography instead uses enormous grids with billions of individual points across thousands of dimensions. The NSA says the approach has promise. Read the full story.

—Patrick Howell O’Neill