Harvesting

“Harvesting” – a cartoon that illustrates how quantum is turning the hacker’s scythe into a combine, able to sweep entire fields of our digital lives.

We’ve moved nearly every part of our lives online – banking, healthcare, work, even our personal desires through ChatGPT. Every password, every two-factor code, every “secure” login relies on encryption. In fact, multi-factor authentication is now used by almost 90% of large enterprises.

But quantum computing threatens to break that trust. Unlike classical machines, quantum computers exploit superposition and entanglement to solve problems exponentially faster. Algorithms like Shor’s could one day reduce the time to crack RSA or ECC encryption from centuries to hours. Even today’s early devices (known as NISQ systems) have shown glimmers of this power. IBM, for example, has demonstrated measurable quantum speedups on 27-qubit processors using error-mitigated algorithms.

That’s why data harvesting has already begun. State actors such as China and North Korea are hoarding encrypted archives, such as financial records, medical histories, military communications, knowing they may be able to decrypt them later. Skeptics say most of this is digital junk, but buried in the noise are crown jewels.

The counter-offensive is underway: in 2024, US-based NIST released its first three post-quantum cryptography standards, and companies like IBM, PQShield, and SandboxAQ are racing to embed them into real-world systems. As Anne Neuberger, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor, put it, “we know adversaries are harvesting data now to decrypt later. The transition to post-quantum cryptography isn’t just a technical upgrade – it’s a race to secure the future before the future arrives.”