Quantum computers have the potential to break much of today’s cryptography and upend our entire digital economy in the process. What isn’t discussed enough is how to be ready for cryptographic disaster scenarios, including, but not limited, to the creation of more powerful quantum computers.

The answer is crypto-agility and it can handle the gradual evolutionary changes in cryptography as well as earth-shattering breakthroughs in the feasibility of attacks.

To sum up where we are with quantum computing:

1. The tools we have for keeping our data safe today are excellent.
2. Over time, what we think is most appropriate for protecting our data – both algorithms and key sizes – evolves and changes.
3. Quantum computers are here, but we have no idea when they’ll be powerful enough to threaten current cryptography or even if that’s already happened somewhere in secret.
4. Soon we’ll have a new standard for public-key cryptography that is theoretically quantum computer safe, but which may or may not prove to be generally safe.

Set Yourself Up For Success With Crypto-agility 

Crypto-agility is a process where you separate the concerns of algorithms and parameters like key sizes from your code and your systems.

You accomplish this by creating a layer of abstraction that insulates developers and infrastructure from low-level cryptographic decisions.

I'm just scratching the surface here in the newsletter. Keep reading the blog to learn more about crypto-agility and for recommendations on how to become crypto-agile.