How can encryption methods catch up to modern threats 

In our hyper-connected world, we rely on encrypted communications every day. It’s either to shop online and digitally sign documents or make bank transactions and check our steps on fitness trackers. 


Image by robin_rm | Freepik

However, today’s encryption, which transforms data into unreadable formats to keep our information secure, is under intense pressure. Cybercriminals are increasingly sophisticated, and our networks, woven with cloud services and third-party platforms, are more vulnerable than ever. JP Morgan reports it repels 45 billion hacking attempts a day.

The most significant threat is something called Y2Q or Q-Day. This is a time in the future when quantum computers will make our encryption methods obsolete. To grasp the scale, a quantum computer could break the RSA-2048 encryption in a day, while the fastest supercomputer currently would take a millennia to accomplish that. The RSA-2048 is an algorithm that is the backbone of internet security. 

This is owing to the foundation of quantum computing. Adopting the rules of quantum physics, quantum computing taps into the properties of ‘small’ particles or atoms where they can exist in multiple states simultaneously, which is called quantum superposition. Moreover, the particles remain connected over distance, called entanglement, allowing the quantum computer to explore any possibilities at once, significantly speeding up certain computations.

It’s not an overstatement to say that, without encryption, the entire security of our connected world would collapse, threatening the stability of society. While Q-Day may be years away, there is also a growing need to boost the resilience of encryption. ‘Harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks are escalating. They are strategic attacks where cybercriminals harvest encrypted data today with the intent of decrypting it later when quantum tools become available.

Moreover, modern encryption methods, developed roughly 50 years ago, could not envision the computational demands of today, let alone those of the quantum era. Relying on hard-to-solve mathematical problems, these systems mostly only protect data in transit or at rest, leaving it exposed during use. That poses a problem for data-intensive applications such as AI training models, which process vast amounts of data that is often private or confidential. Current approaches typically require models to decrypt data during training, leaving it exposed, or employ privacy-preserving techniques that slow processing speeds, making them difficult to apply at scale.

To address these challenges, Boston University’s multidisciplinary research team is developing a groundbreaking, physics-inspired scheme for data security and privacy called Encrypted Operator Computing (EOC). The project merges physics, computer science, and mathematics to develop scalable methods for computing directly on encrypted data, something which has been long considered the ‘holy grail’ of cryptography. The goal is to accelerate performance and make secure, privacy-preserving computing widely accessible for real-world use. 

“We’re in a new era of technology, where the frontiers of computational capability lie at the intersection of classical and quantum computing, AI, and data security,” said principal investigator Andrei Ruckenstein, the Professor of Physics at Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences. “The most urgent and complex challenges in these areas, such as safeguarding sensitive data or preparing for the quantum threat, cannot be solved by current encryption and security methods,” he added.

The EOC allows users to manipulate and gain insights from confidential data without ever exposing the raw information to third parties. This level of security and privacy is essential for applications such as blockchain transactions, medical AI models, cloud services, and more. “While our EOC method is designed to work on classical computers doing classical computations, the conceptual breakthrough behind it is quantum computation-inspired,” said Claudio Chamon, a Professor of Physics in Boston University′s College of Arts and Sciences. 

The team, which includes collaborators at Cornell University and the University of Central Florida, has just published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that illustrates some of the ideas driving its approach to cryptography.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2415913122