RSA and AES Have Been Broken. What’s Next for Cybersecurity?

For the first time, research from a Chinese team has demonstrated successful quantum attacks against the algorithms that protect much of today’s sensitive data. While the immediacy of the research is debatable, the breakthrough signals a critical shift in the quantum security field.

What does this mean for the cybersecurity landscape? And, more importantly, what can be done to safeguard sensitive data now? We’ll take a closer look in this blog post, breaking down exactly what the researchers accomplished and why it’s significant.

We’ll also examine how emerging technologies like microsharding can offer a robust defense against both classical and quantum threats — not by trying to outsmart quantum computers, but by fundamentally changing how we protect data.

What did the researchers accomplish?

Led by senior researcher Wang Chao, the Chinese research team demonstrated a novel approach to cryptographic attacks using D-Wave’s quantum annealing systems. Their work, published in the Chinese Journal of Computers, achieved two significant outcomes:

RSA factorization: The team successfully factored a 22-bit RSA integer using the D-Wave Advantage system, demonstrating the potential for quantum computing to tackle cryptographic problems.
Attacks on other algorithms: The team also attacked several algorithms crucial to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), including Present, Rectangle, and the Gift-64 block cipher.

The key insight of the research was how quantum annealing can turn cryptographic attacks into combinatorial optimization problems, making them easier to solve. (Many algorithms protecting sensitive data today are based on mathematical equations that are computationally difficult for classical computers, but not quantum ones, to solve efficiently.)

The upshot? The advent of quantum computing threatens the security of enterprise algorithms and the data they protect — and the timeline for these threats may be much sooner than we anticipated.

Analysis: What are the implications for cybersecurity?

First, it’s important to note that some experts have doubts about the significance of the announcement. Similar announcements by research groups in the past have often been seen as propaganda. One Forbes article made a point of noting that China hasn’t come close to breaking military-grade encryption, and that the reports are overstated.

That said, even if the development is exaggerated, it brings us a step closer to the day when RSA and AES truly fail. And that day will in turn bring a cascade of security challenges.

The most pressing concern is the threat of “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL), when attackers exfiltrate encrypted data with the intention of decrypting it in the future. HNDL attacks can retroactively compromise sensitive data like IP, financial records, and even government secrets — even if that data is currently secure by today’s standards.

What does this all mean? The research suggests that we can’t wait years to implement quantum-resistant solutions. Because data harvested today may be exposed tomorrow, organizations need to act now to protect their sensitive data against future quantum threats.

Solving for quantum resistance

There are a few pieces of good news. First, the quantum-resistant algorithms from the recent NIST standardization are impervious to the quantum annealing technique used by the Chinese research team.

Second, many security companies are already working on “quantum-safe” encryption methods to protect against future attacks. But the Chinese research is still a wake-up call, and it indicates that the industry needs to accelerate their work on new encryption strategies.

Quantum-safe with ShardSecure

Microsharding offers a fundamentally different approach to defeating the quantum computing threat. By breaking data into tiny, unintelligible shards and distributing them across multiple storage locations, microsharding ensures that no complete dataset exists in any single location. (Even a quantum computer capable of breaking standard encryption can’t decrypt what it can’t reassemble.)

Microsharding is particularly effective against HNDL threats. Even if adversaries harvest fragments of data today, they won’t be able to reconstruct the original information when quantum computing advances enough to decrypt it. It’s like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle when most of the pieces are held in different lockboxes around the world.

With its innovative use of microsharding, the ShardSecure platform doesn’t rely on trying to out-compute quantum systems. Instead, it makes the sensitive data itself quantum-resistant and safeguards it from HNDL.

Conclusion: Time to rethink data protection

While they might debate the timelines, most experts would agree that quantum computing is no longer a distant threat. The Chinese research team has made it all too clear that organizations need to start preparing now for a post-quantum world.

Rather than waiting for quantum-resistant encryption standards to emerge, enterprises should consider implementing technologies like microsharding to ensure robust data protection for the future. The time is now, and the solution is not to build better locks — it’s to make the data itself impossible to steal, no matter how far quantum computing progresses.