How quantum computers will undermine cryptography

As a result, investment in quantum computing has increased and the pace of development has accelerated, with companies like Microsoft and IBM getting on board in recent years. While it used to be thought that the first functioning quantum computers would emerge in 2050, it now looks like they may only be 10-20 years away.

However, Mr Snow warns that while quantum computers will be a "wonderful gift" for the scientific community, they also pose a "monstrous threat" to the security functions running on the World Wide Web.

"Every single security function out there is using something called public-key cryptography. It's a specific set of algoriths and they all share one common property they absolutely spill their guts and fall apart under a quantum computing attack," said Mr Snow.

"So the quantum computer comes to exist, and web security is dead. Nobody should send any money anywhere over the web again."

Mr Snow said this is mainly due to vulnerabilities in the 'border gateway control engines' that transfer data across national borders. These vulnerabilities are well documented, and cyber criminals have been exploiting them to steal money and spy on web users for the past 20 years, but they have never been fixed because the web is not owned or controlled by any single entity.

The only people with the power to fix the vulnerabilities are the network administrators that control the border gateway protocol, but they do not regard data protection as their problem, as their job is simply to ship data across boundaries not to store it.

"They don't realise that if the border gateway protocol is fixed, it would solve a hell of a lot of problems for the millions of people that are being misdirected on the end points at their sites because of bad routing decisions that have been made by attackers," said Mr Snow.

In the event that these border gateway control engines are taken down by a quantum computing attack, it could bring down the entire Web, according to Mr Snow.

He pointed to the congressional testimony of Sami Saydjari, founder and president of the US Cyber Defense Agency, which was published in 2007 and demonstrated the potential devastation an incident of this scale could wreak.

Mr Saydjari claimed that, with three years preparation and a budget of $500 million, an attacker could launch a cyber attack that would take down the US infrastructure for 30 days, crippling transportation networks, rupturing oil and gas pipelines with improper control, disrupting financial services and disabling communications networks.

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How quantum computers will undermine cryptography