NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption
In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands at the tail of a six-month cascade of Snowden-era disclosures about NSA cryptography work. In September 2013, reporting showed the agency had worked to defeat much internet encryption through standards manipulation and supercomputing brute force, and by mid-December the Post detailed how cracking cellphone encryption code gave the agency capacity to decode private conversations.
What changes with this story is the horizon: rather than weakening today's algorithms, the agency is documented as racing to build a room-size quantum machine that would obsolete nearly all of them at once. A Reuters report alleging an NSA arrangement with RSA Security — flagged there as unconfirmed — has already put commercial crypto vendors under suspicion, so the quantum disclosure deepens an existing credibility problem for U.S.-origin cryptography.
First-order effects
- Cryptographic vendors and standards bodies face immediate scrutiny of every U.S.-touching algorithm and implementation, with the unconfirmed RSA allegations turning routine vendor relationships into reputational liabilities.
- Foreign governments and enterprises buying American security products reassess trust in the supply chain, since a working quantum decryptor would render their deployed protections worthless regardless of how they were implemented.
Second-order effects
- Buyers shift procurement toward open-source, internationally reviewed cryptography and non-U.S. providers, splitting what had been a largely unified global encryption market along trust lines.
- Academic and corporate cryptographers are pushed to prioritize quantum-resistant algorithm design years earlier than commercial demand alone would justify, since the NSA's program signals state actors treat the timeline as near-term.
Third-order effects
- If classified quantum capability runs ahead of public quantum computing, the industry drifts toward a standing asymmetry: intelligence agencies hold decryption advantages that commercial defenders cannot verify or price, inviting regulatory intervention on cryptographic standards.
- The endgame is a generational migration off public-key cryptography altogether — a wholesale replacement of RSA-style systems whose cost and disruption will be argued over for years, independent of when any quantum computer actually ships.
The trend: Signals-intelligence agencies are pulling quantum computing out of the physics lab and into the cryptography arms race, forcing a generational redesign of the world's public-key encryption.