Quantum computers pose a huge threat to security, and the NIST wants your help

It's no secret that quantum computers could render many of today's encryption methods useless, and now the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology wants the public to help it head off that threat. The federal agency recently published a report focusing on cryptography in a quantum world that outlines a long-term approach for avoiding the problem before it happens. "There has been a lot of research into quantum computers in recent years, and everyone from major computer companies to the government want their cryptographic algorithms to be what we call'quantum resistant,'" said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody. "So if and when someone does build a large-scale quantum computer, we want to have algorithms in place that it can't crack." Encryption often relies on the challenge of factoring large numbers to ensure security, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria recently demonstrated what they said is the first five-atom quantum computer capable of cracking such encryption schemes.