Will VPNs Survive Quantum Decryption?
(TechNadu) At some point in the future, quantum computers could suddenly reach the point where cracking our best encryption would be trivial and that would be very bad news for VPNs.
Lots of brilliant people are working on the problem of post-quantum VPNs. Basically, cryptographers have five to ten years to figure out encryption problems that aren’t solvable by quantum computers or, at least, those that take too long even with that technology.
Models for post-quantum VPNs exist, though it’s not clear whether these are only going to be cost-effective for enterprise VPNs, rather than the private VPN services that we all make use of today. Private VPNs like ExpressVPN or NordVPN have put a lot of power into regular users’ hands, shielding them from prying eyes and letting them access or share information freely. If post-quantum VPN solutions are too costly or complex to implement, that’s something in danger of extinction.
The specter of historical decryption of intercepted data is legitimately scary. It really should make us think twice about what we send and store using current encryption technology. That’s not to say you should stop using encryption! We should all keep using VPNs when needed and encrypt our data when possible.
What you should do is think twice when sending out information that could be intercepted. Would that data be a problem five years from now if it were to be decrypted? If the answer to that question is “yes”, you may want to consider using a different way of getting it to its destination.
