(YahooFinance) According to “Post-Quantum Cryptography: A Ten-Year Market and Technology Forecast,” a recent report from Inside Quantum Technology (www.insidequantumtechnology.com), the market for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) software and devices will ramp up dramatically as quantum computers become capable of breaking popular public-key encryption algorithms. PQC refers to techniques using software algorithms to encrypt messages on a classical computer in a manner that is resistant to being broken by quantum computers.
Revenues from PQC products will reach $145 million by 2014 jumping to $3.8 billion by 2028 as the quantum threat becomes more apparent. Inside Quantum Technology is the only industry analyst firm that specializes in tracking and forecasting the quantum technology market.
More on this report can be found at: https://www.insidequantumtechnology.com/product/post-quantum-cryptography-ten-year-forecast/
Although quantum computers capable of easily breaking common encryption schemes may take a decade to arrive, IT managers are already counting down to Y2Q (Years to Quantum). Some are already implementing PQC for highly valuable data that must last until well after the arrival of quantum computers. Medical records and aircraft designs are two examples of such data. In 2018 the Cloud Security Alliance conducted a survey to better understand how aware IT managers were of quantum risks. They discovered that 86 percent of such managers were aware, at least to some degree, of such risks and almost 20 percent believed that PQC will be required in the next 12 months.
Early adopters of PQC will be those IT managers who have identified a specific need to protect high-value, long shelf-life data. For the rest of the IT community, the conversion will begin when PQC standards are finalized by NIST and other standardization groups.
From the Report
• The largest market for PQC will eventually be standard web browsers, simply because there are so many browsers in cell phones and personal computers. Here PQC will replace the current RSA and Diffie-Hellman algorithms in use today and will be easy to upgrade. By 2026 PQC revenues generated by browsers will reach almost $650 million. However, early PQC revenues in the browser segment will use hybrid classical/PQC algorithms and browsers will be able to select the appropriate encryption algorithm to use depending on the site.
• The financial sector is particularly vulnerable to attack, since large sums of money are obtained in a successful hack. Cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin, Ethereum and the others – use classical public key algorithms and will need to convert to PQC to stay safe. Already, two quantum resistant cryptocurrencies — Mochimo and QRL have been released and others are in development. By 2026 revenues from PQC products sold into the financial services industry will reach almost $300 million.
• While PQC is mostly implemented in software, for certain embedded systems, a hardware approach may be preferable because these applications do not typically have available a powerful main processor that can implement the full algorithm in software. Some organizations are working to implement the algorithms either using a dedicated ASIC chip or else using an FPGA. Infineon has developed a contactless smart card chip that implements the NewHope algorithm. By 2026, chip-level PQC solutions will generate $120 million.
About Inside Quantum Technology
Inside Quantum Technology is the first company to be dedicated to meeting the strategic information and analysis needs of the emerging quantum technology sector.
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