Creative Destruction in Cryptography

Public Key (PK) Cryptography is a field that’s been getting a lot of attention in the last few years. Comprised of a pair of a visible public key and a secret public key, public key cryptosystems offer unique benefits and weaknesses compared to the traditional symmetric key architectures of the past few hundred years. Famous programs and algorithms such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), Diffie-Hellman*,  and RSA have pushed PK ciphers into the mainstream and out of white papers and academic documents. For many of these developments, their resistance to serious cryptoanalytic attacks comes from our inability to factor large prime numbers. This security is no longer bulletproof though, thanks to the advent of quantum computers – computers based on quantum “qubits” that hold state thanks to the maddening physics of quantum mechanics.