Quantum and the Future of Encryption

Earlier this year, Samsung started testing quantum-safe encryption within Knox Vault, bringing new cryptography from research labs into everyday devices. Quantum systems operate based on probabilities rather than fixed states, which enables them to solve specific problems much faster than classical computers found in our devices.

Modern encryption is designed to be difficult to reverse. Your device encrypts data with a key, and the protection relies on the fact that reversing this process would require an impractical amount of computing power.

Here are some numbers to comprehend:

• RSA-2048: Currently, breaking a 2048-bit RSA key on a classical computer would take longer than 13.8 billion years. The "lock" involves multiplying two large secret prime numbers, and breaking it means figuring out which two numbers were multiplied. A powerful, fault-tolerant quantum computer using Shor's algorithm could do this in hours.

• ECC-256 (Bitcoin's secp256k1): Here, the "lock" is a one-way process from a secret number to a public key on a curve. Reverse-engineering it on a classical computer would also take longer than 13.8 billion years. However, with enough quantum power and Shor's algorithm, the same reversal could take days.

We're not there yet. Current devices have thousands to a few million noisier qubits without the necessary error correction. What's problematic is that attackers can store encrypted data today and decrypt it later once the technology advances.

Phones contain private keys for banking, identity, wallets, and other personal data. Moving those keys and sessions to quantum-safe algorithms on the device ensures they remain protected, even if someone records the traffic now and attempts to unlock it later.