The MoD has got their hands on a quantum computer, courtesy of our friends over at ORCA Computing. This is a game-changer, yet it isn’t getting too much exposure in the press. So wtf is a quantum computer? It’s a PC that can work at silly speeds and handle silly amounts of data. Computers have limits, limits to their processing speeds and resulting outputs. Because of these limits we can do stuff like set secure passwords and know it’d take a basic computer a hundred years to comb through all password possibilities before it found yours. Increase its processing power, you can reduce that 100 years, dramatically. Many tech solutions are floating around the world built on the fact that it’d take a computer too long to do what we don’t want it to do. Take encryption. A lock that is available for everyone to see yet you only hold the key. Now someone could come and try every key possibility in the world but that’d take them ages, way too long for it to be a usable, successful method. But say they could try keys 160 million times faster, it wouldn’t take them long to find the right key for your lock.
A large amount of our society is built on encryption. It’s become a standard for most industries, best practice, often you’ll miss it unless you’re looking for it but trust me its there.
The MoD can make use of quantum computing in ways that you and I couldn’t due to their exposure to data we are kept in the dark on. If it becomes known that the Russians are using the Tor Network to handle communications, odds are the UK could put their ORCA to work decrypting that traffic. Scary stuff. If the UK comes across heavily encrypted hard drives that hold valuable data, it’s just become a little more likely that they could read those files.
Now, illegal decryption is available throughout the world to some extent. In the past, we’ve seen high-profile criminals taken down due to the apparent cracking of encryption. The thing that’s complicating the game is the exposure of these methods. We’ve seen criminals brought down, taken to court and released shortly after because the authority that brought them down refuses to make it known how they did so, likely because the methods they have access to are new, they’re secret and frankly the rest of the world hasn’t caught up. Let’s say an authority can crack Tor Networking, using that as evidence requires a full breakdown of what they did and how, 2 days later Tor would be patched and the method made redundant.
So where am I going with this? Well being blunt there isn’t a huge amount of real-world uses for quantum computing just yet. It’s like buying a Bugatti, the fastest road-legal car in the world but you’ve gotta drive it on UK roads at UK speed limits. Until the software equivalent of a racetrack is built, this computer will sit in an MoD office revving its engine.
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