Presenter: Sayeed Sajal
Authors: Kobi Thatcher
Faculty Advisor: Sayeed Sajal
Institution: Utah Valley University
Encryption is ultimately a question of economics -- an evaluation of cost and benefit, risk and reward. The story of encryption goes back millennia, but encryption became vastly more common and significantly more complex with the advent of modern computing. In moments, programs can encrypt with a level of complexity that might have taken days or months, or years to do by hand, and cracking that encryption without the use of computers would have been an arduous task. Of course, those seeking to crack encryption also have the benefit of significant computing power. Although the contest between encryption and cracking has been around as long as coded messages have been utilized, the contest has taken on an astronomical scale. The Data Encryption Standard, developed in 1976, used to be the standard for encryption. However, with today’s technology, it can be broken in a matter of hours (Wood, 2010). The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), developed in 2001, is the current standard. The US government utilizes a layered encryption scheme to encrypt their classified data and manage authentication and access, with the data at rest encrypted using a 256-bit AES scheme. Brute force cracking the 128-bit AES algorithm with conventional computing methods would take “1 billion, billion years” to crack the encryption; suffice to say, it has not yet been done. However, the inevitable development of quantum computing seems to demand the advent of newer encryption methods that are more resistant to quantum computing. To what degree will they be implemented, and to what degree quantum computing will likely become prevalent enough that wide-scale anti-quantum encryption will be viewed as necessary, uncertain -- ultimately a question of economics.