2034: D Day for Cyber Crime?

Will the advent of quantum computers and quantum encryption call time on Cybercrime?
Is the Internet getting less safe? If you read Internet blogs and news reports regularly, you’ll often come across a doomsdayer commenting on the state of cyber security.
You’ll find articles by the likes of Europol, revealing that cybercrime is now more profitable than the global trade in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined. Plus, you’ll see interviews with the chiefs of big computing businesses, like HP boss Bill Veghte, who reveals that the US navy alone had to fend off 110,000 cyber attacks every hour last year.
You’ll also find reports of talks by people like security researcher Bruce Schneier, who claims that the NSA’s attempts to make the Internet safer are actually having the opposite effect. And statements by industry analysts that say there’s a chronic skills gap when it comes to online security. 
It is true that cybercriminals are getting more skilled. It’s also a fact that, as computers get more powerful, the bad guys of the web will have increasingly sophisticated tools to work with.
Quantum computers aren’t currently available to the mass market. These super-computers, which can process zeros and ones at the same time, whereas non quantum computers can only process one at a time, would set you back around nine million dollars if you decided you wanted one.
However, when physicists and computer scientists make the breakthroughs necessary to bring these sort of next-generation computers to the mass market, cyber criminals are going to have a field day.
For starters, they’ll be able to use the power of quantum computing to crack the encryptions that most Internet security relies on. At the moment, everything from passwords to credit card details are encrypted using complicated mathematical multiplications of massive prime numbers. These sorts of encryptions would take a normal computer a lifetime to decode. However, a quantum computer might be able to crack such mathematical codes in a matter of hours.
So where does that leave Internet security in the future? The answer, according to computer scientists, is quantum cryptography. In this case, encryption leaves maths behind and harnesses physics.
Essentially, quantum cryptography uses particles instead of numbers to encode data. These particles could be anything from ions to atoms, but today’s experiments focus on the use of photons – aka waves of light, like those used in lasers.
Most research into quantum cryptography has been done in the field of quantum key distribution or QKD. The founding paper was written by Bennett and Brassard in 1984 and is still widely referenced today.
Very basically, quantum key distribution enables two parties – traditionally referred to as Alice and Bob – to share a random and secret key which, once established, can be used to encrypt further messages.
The key utilises the behaviour of light particles, including the direction in which they travel and the degree in which they vibrate (aka oscillate) to establish itself.
This method is theoretically safe against an eavesdropper – typically referred to in these experimental contexts as Eve – because the way the system works allows Bob and Alice to detect Eve’s presence if she tries to intercept the key. Again, this is based on the behaviour of the light particles.

This fact derives from a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that anyone who measures a quantum system must disturb it. Eve must measure it to eavesdrop on it, and therefore introduces detectable anomalies into the quantum system that Alice and Bob are using.
So, science aside, what might a quantum encryption system look like in the future? Well, it shouldn’t look too much different to your broadband system at home. In practice, light waves could be sent along fibre optic cables and received by a detector box that could be independent or built into a quantum computer.
Of course, all these developments are a long time away. As mentioned above, physicists are still working on scaling quantum computers. But that doesn’t mean there won’t soon be a time when we’ve got Q-Pads in our home rather than i-Pads (where the q stands for quantum of course).
In fact, some industry forecasters are predicting quantum computers could be mainstream within the next 20 years. If that happens, there might be a few former cyber criminals at the Job Center and the Internet blogs and news reports will be full of articles on the reduction of cybercrime and the D Day of the dark net war.