Your passwords, your credit cards, your bank accounts, and your emails all belong to China’s communist regime.
It isn’t a reality yet, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is working tirelessly to ensure that it becomes so.
To achieve that reality, the regime is increasingly turning to quantum computing to process previously unfathomable amounts of data. Its goal is to break the RSA encryption used to protect most of the information stored online.
Quantum computing’s potential to wholly shatter the encryption that safeguards so much of the world’s data has long been feared, but most believed that the threat was still a decade away at least.
However, a December 2022 paper co-written by 24 researchers from numerous academic bodies and state-owned laboratories in China claims to have developed a method to do just that.
Specifically, the paper claims that an algorithm developed by mathematician Claus-Peter Schnorr last year, which couldn’t be scaled on classical computers, could effectively be implemented by offloading some of the most time-consuming processes to a quantum system.
The incident highlights not only that China has taken one more step toward total domination of the online ecosystem but also the unique role that hybrid quantum-classical systems will have in ushering forward a new era of security uncertainty.
Hybrid Systems Are the Next Threat
Regardless of the success of Schnorr’s algorithm, the episode presents new evidence that the CCP and its many state-owned research bodies are seeking to leverage the high-stakes field of quantum computing to undermine and displace the United States, according to Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.“What it establishes is that they are working very hard on two aspects of the quantum race with the United States,” Herman said. “One is developing their own quantum computer technology including quantum computers that would be able to eventually decrypt systems both symmetric and asymmetric.
“On the other hand, they’re very busy hardening their own sites and protecting themselves against that type of decryption effort on the part of the United States.”
Herman, who also oversees Hudson’s Quantum Alliance Initiative, said hybrid quantum-classical machines would be an integral aspect of the quantum race between the liberal international order and authoritarian regimes the world over.
A quantum bit, or qubit, is a basic unit of quantum information used by quantum computers. Whereas traditional processors use regular bits, which can be turned on or off to create binary code, qubits can be turned on, off, or both on and off simultaneously in a phenomenon known as superposition.
The existence of this third state will allow quantum processors to achieve much quicker processing speeds than their traditional counterparts, but getting the two systems to work together is tricky.
By connecting a quantum system with a classical system, researchers can effectively leverage the raw power of one with the stability of the other.
“The true path to the quantum future is the combination of quantum and classical digital technology, especially in computing, which will powerfully accelerate access to the potential benefits of quantum information science.” the report reads.
“In short, ‘hybrid’ computation creates a collaboration in which users run different aspects of a problem through the quantum and classical components within the system. The division of labor depends on which system is best suited to solve a particular aspect of the problem.”
The Chinese researchers who authored their paper on Schnorr’s algorithm proposed just such a system, saying that “practical quantum advantage” could be obtained by delegating key complex tasks to a quantum machine while using a classical system for the rest of the processes.
Although the researchers themselves used only a small portion of the quantum power that would be needed to break RSA encryption outright, they reported that their model could be sufficiently scaled and was likely to succeed “in the near future.”
“What they’ve done is they’ve linked up their quantum components for their research ... with classical computing,” Herman said. “In other words, it’s a hybrid system that they’re using.
“The idea that you have to wait until you have a big, monolithic quantum computing system [to break encryption] ... I think is becoming exposed as false.”
Propaganda Victory and the CCP’s Research ‘Behind Closed Doors’
Because CCP laws designate data as a national resource and enable the regime to collect any data in the possession of an entity within China for national security purposes, any research conducted, algorithms invented, or data gleaned by cracking RSA will ultimately belong to the regime.That the paper published in December 2022 involved researchers from state-owned institutions and was widely telegraphed rather than conducted with any modicum of secrecy demonstrated a wider ambition of the CCP, Herman said.
“What [this paper] really shows is that they’re not doing this in a sort of stealth way,” he said.
“They see this as a way to really proclaim just how tough and how serious they are about this quantum decryption effort.”
While the paper is no atomic bomb, it may be a smoking gun, and he fears that the regime could be working on far more complex research behind the scenes as part of its effort to undermine and eventually displace the United States.
“This is going to increasingly be a part of their strategic offensive against the United States and against the West,” Herman said.
“We should take it very seriously, even if the announcement itself is not something we have to worry about in the near term.”
To that end, he said the regime had definitely won a propaganda victory with the paper and could use its advances in quantum computing to inspire fear the world over, but its unknown projects could be much more threatening.
“These are all scientific papers that are being published widely,” Herman said.
“This is what the [CCP] is telling us that they’re doing. We don’t really know what it is that they are doing behind closed doors.”
As such, although Herman believed just last year that world-altering breakthroughs in quantum computing would be a product of the 2030s, he said this most recent development has forced him to truncate that timeline.
Unrestricted Warfare
For retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, the CCP’s rush toward quantum supremacy is just one more tool in the regime’s multipronged attack on the United States.Rather than an ultimate weapon, Spalding considers quantum computing to be part of the regime’s much larger campaign of “unrestricted warfare,” through which it seeks to leverage every nonmilitary means at its disposal to garner real military advantage over the United States.
“The Chinese have been vacuuming up data for a long time in hopes of having a powerful enough quantum computer to crack the RSA encryption,” he said.
“That being said, the technique mentioned in the paper does not necessarily confer advantage until and unless it is able to be usefully accessed by those that have an interest in the data they have collected.”
To that end, Spalding believes that the AI required to sort and make sense of the immense amount of data that quantum is capable of gleaning is more important than the means to acquire it.
At any rate, he connected both AI and quantum to the CCP’s ambition to build out and operate a state based on “data-powered authoritarianism,” which required the regime to amass data through legal, quasi-legal, and illicit means.
“Taking unrestricted warfare into account lets us see that it is the evolution of technology and particularly the internet with its vast amount of data, which is the binding agent for all things that give incredible advantages to any authoritarian who would wield it correctly,” Spalding said.
“Quantum is merely a tool. It can allow for communications that cannot be listened in to and can be used to do things like crack modern encryption. For the purposes of the dominance of the CCP, artificial intelligence is much more important and powerful than quantum technologies.”
Asked how the United States could prevent or even slow the regime’s march toward owning the data of all Americans, he was less than optimistic.
So long as the CCP regime controlled China, its military-civil fusion strategy would mandate that U.S. technology and research effectively be co-opted against the international order, according to Spalding.
This problem presents a unique challenge to the United States and like-minded democratic states, he said, as their open nature renders their economic, political, and media systems innately vulnerable to CCP propaganda, IP theft, and coercion.
In such a scenario, Spalding said, the only path the United States could follow toward victory was to decouple and cut off the regime’s access to U.S. markets, media, and technology altogether.
“During the Cold War, we were effectively able to keep technology from Soviet hands by decoupling the economies. By coupling China to ours we have given them the ability to defeat us with our own system,” he said.
US Must Prepare for Decades of Quantum Defense
For his part, Herman wasn’t so sure that decoupling was the future.Although national leaders were slow to act at first, the United States isn’t without its own efforts to defend against the quantum threat, and Herman noted that the Biden administration had “stepped up” its efforts to prepare the nation for a quantum future.
“It takes a long time to migrate to post-quantum cryptography, and making systems quantum-safe is going to take time and effort and resources,” Herman said.
“The Biden administration, much to their credit, has been really stepping up this last year with regard to making government agencies quantum-safe and quantum-secure. The next step is that we’ve got to get the private sector and the private companies including our banks and power companies to get serious about making themselves quantum-ready and quantum-secure.”
The battle isn’t yet won, however, and he believes that the war for quantum dominance will be one borne out through stiff competition and innovation over the course of decades. The victor of which will shape the future of the world.
“This is going to be decisive in the next couple of decades,” Herman said. “We still have time, but we may not have quite as much time as we used to think before that threat becomes imminent.
“An article like this is another straw in the wind. It’s another indication that that day is coming and we need to really focus on this now as a way to protect our economy and national security and to think about how we can deter a threat like China.”
