NIST Sets Quantum Safe Security Standards for Industry. What Does it Mean for Banking?

Quantum computing continues to attract business interest as it evolves from research to reality. Harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics, this rapidly emerging technology is widely expected to answer problems that today’s most powerful classical supercomputers cannot solve and never will. For regulated industries like banking, quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize targeting and prediction, asset trading optimization, and risk profiling.?

However, the advent of large-scale quantum computing offers great promise to science and society, but also brings a significant?threat to our global information infrastructure.?Eventually quantum computers will be capable of factoring prime numbers used with asymmetric encryption algorithms, which form the basis of current data security systems. The current cryptography to keep bank cards, ATMs, mobile apps and online payments secure could put?financial institutions cybersecurity infrastructure and the sensitive data it holds at risk.?

Quantum-safe cryptography is an effort that identifies algorithms that are resistant to attacks by both classical and quantum computers to keep information assets secure even after a large-scale quantum computer has been built. Without quantum-safe cryptography and security, all public data is vulnerable to being tampered, hacked or manipulated.????

IBM is home to some of the best cryptographic experts in the world. And this week the?National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),?a US government lab that publishes standards for government agencies to safely use cryptography, announced IBM as one of the winners of?a six-year-long competition to create quantum-safe algorithms. Scientists based out of our research lab in Zurich created 3 of the 4 winning algorithms.

The age of quantum computing requires business, ethical, and legal perspectives to guarantee the integrity and authenticity of data. This acknowledgement by the NIST reinforces that as we prepare for a quantum world, IBM is committed to defining the standards that will secure information during this technical advancement.??

IBM is committed to protecting our clients’ most valuable data. IBM Quantum Safe is a portfolio of cryptographic technologies and consulting expertise that are created on IBM’s long-standing ethical, responsible, and trustworthy thinking and principals. We have already started?to take cyber resiliency to a new level and protect our own data against future threats that could evolve with expected advances in quantum computing, so we are ready to help our clients?understand the implications of moving to new algorithms.

To learn more about IBM’s Quantum Safe cryptography work and services please visit: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/quantum-safe