You've been
hacked. Those three words can be the
ultimate gut punch. When you read them,
any feelings of safety and security get
ripped away. Whether it's your personal
messages, your social media passwords,
your bank details, your company files,
or anything. The consequences of having
messages that were once private become
public is an awful feeling with
potentially dire consequences. So, it's
no wonder that truly unhackable
encryption is such a sought after
technology. And China may be leading the
way to just
that. How? It's all thanks to a tiny
Chinese satellite, a record- setting
experiment, and a tantalizing new
technology, one relying on that magic
word, quantum. And according to
scientists, the method China used,
quantum key distribution, promises to be
unhackable due to fundamental principles
of quantum physics itself.
But what is actually going on beneath
all the hype? Are we really at the dawn
of an impenetrable secrecy forever? Or
will that enigmatic word quantum be the
death of secrets
[Music]
quantum encryption could change our world
forever. Tricks to keep our messages
secret have been around for thousands of
years, almost as long as humans have had
written secrets. For example, Julius
Caesar used a cipher in his messages to
appear like unintelligible nonsense to
an enemy, but they could be easily
decoded by his generals or friends who
knew the trick. The idea Caesar used was
simple. For every letter of the
alphabet, he simply replaced the letter
with another letter a set number of
places further up or down the alphabet.
For example, if he moved everything
right three spaces, then A would become
D, B would become E, and so on. X would
wrap around the alphabet to become
A. In this way, Caesar could keep vital
information secret, garbling phrases
like this one.
But as long as you knew the number of
places he moved the letters along, in
this case three to the right, then you
could easily move everything back to
reveal the true and important message.
Astramm is
great. In this case, that single piece
of information three to the right is the
key that allows you to unlock the
cipher. and encryption has been making
use of this same essential concept ever
since, albeit with a little more
complexity. Unfortunately, this cipher
has an obvious weakness. There are not
that many letters in the alphabet, only
26. So, if you came across a message
encrypted with Caesar's cipher, you
could try moving everything along once,
then twice, and so on until the words
started making sense. At most, you'd
only need to try moving letters 25
times, and you could crack Caesar's
code. It would only take a few minutes
to know if you were on the right
track. This method of encryption hacking
is known as a brute force attack, making
guesses at the key again and again until
the encryption lies decoded at your
feet. It is a valid strategy, provided
there aren't too many options of what
the key could be. Of course, encryption
experts over the years worked out more
and more complicated ways of jumbling up
the letters to make it harder and harder
to crack through brute force. For
instance, why keep all the letters of
the alphabet in order? Keyword ciphers
don't worry about that. This second type
of cipher works by simply deciding on a
keyword and then laying the rest of the
alphabet in their normal order after
that keyword. Using the resulting jumble
as the starting point of your cipher
means that a codec cracker will never be
able to break your code by simply moving
everything along. Now they need to know
the
keyword. Or do they? Technically with
sufficient patience this type of
encryption is still crackable even
without the key. Of course, there are
approximately 43 septillion ways you
could rearrange the alphabet, which
naturally would take far too long to try
each option individually. If you tried
one arrangement, it would take longer
than the history of the universe. But it
is still technically crackable through
brute force. If you find a way of
speeding this guessing process up, it
would take humans far too long to do
something like this. But once the
computer was invented in the early 19th
century, encryptions that were not
robust enough could fall to computers
making guesses much, much
faster. If a human guessing is like a
hammer hitting the door, computers are
like
jackhammers. Modern CPUs can perform
billions to trillions of calculations
per second. While it would still take a
computer a long time to crack a keyword
cipher, trillions are far less than
septillions. After all, this time can be
consistently reduced by bringing more
computing power to bear. There is a fear
that government agencies like the CIA
have secret supercomputers with endless
CPU brood forcing their way through the
encryption of messages. To combat this,
modern encryption does not specifically
rely on ciphers anymore. Instead, many
types of encryption, such as the widely
used RSA crypto systems, rely on complex
mathematical problems for which there is
no known algorithm a computer can use to
solve them. RSA works by taking two
massive prime numbers and multiplying
them together. The resulting number
called the modulus is part of the public
key that is shared with others. To
unlock the encryption, a hacker needs to
know which two prime numbers were used
to create the modulus. And there's no
easy way to factor it back into its
prime numbers. Even a supercomput would
struggle. Ultimately, the principle
behind encryption has increased in
complexity, but mostly works under the
same basic idea. Messages are muddled by
mixing them up according to some kind of
rule. And if you possess a certain key,
the message can be
unscrambled. Technically, those messages
can be unscrambled through brute force
methods even without the key. But the
keys have become so complex that even
with powerful supercomputers, brute
force methods supposedly would take
thousands of years to be
effective. So our messages are safe
then. No, because there is a point of
vulnerability. If you want to decode an
encrypted message, the sender of the
message still needs to give you the key.
If this key can be intercepted, the
encryption can be undone without any
need for brute force methods. And so we
turn to quantum encryption and what
China just achieved with the MOSI
satellite. For four decades, scientists
have theorized about a method of sending
encryption keys that is completely
irrefutably
unhackable. Very cleverly, they don't
rely on simply being too complicated for
hackers to bother, but rather utilize
the fundamental principles of the
universe, the principles of quantum
superposition and uncertainty.
We know that particles, although they
appear solid and immutable up here in
the regular world, behave very strangely
on a small enough level. Specifically,
they behave like particles and waves at
the same time. Now, you can measure the
position of a particle, but you'd
struggle to determine its momentum. On
the other hand, a wave's momentum is
easy enough to measure, but you'd have
to settle for measuring its wavelength
rather than its exact position. The
result of this is that we cannot
actually know both the speed and
position of particles at a quantum level
at the same time, at least not with a
good deal of uncertainty. This is known
as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
and is a proven fact of quantum physics.
Weirdly enough, we also know that once
the particles are observed, they settle
on one of the two states. It has been
proved through experiments like the
double slit experiment that a single
particle can travel through multiple
paths at the same time and only settles
on one path or the other once it is
interacted with until then it travels
down both paths in what is known as
superp position left and right like
Shreddinger's famous cat neither alive
nor dead until the box is opened and it
is seen
These principles of quantum physics make
it so that once a particle is observed,
it behaves differently from when it is
not observed. And in the early 1980s,
scientists realized that you could
incorporate this into a very safe way to
send encryption keys. If you converted
your encryption key into something
physical, a stream of photons for
example, and came up with a clever
enough method, it would be possible
through statistics to see whether your
photons had been observed or not between
the sender and the receiver of the key.
In other words, it would be possible to
see whether some sneaky hacker had
intercepted your encryption key in
transit, noted it down, and then sent it
back on its way to its original
recipient, hoping to remain
undetected. According to the principles
of quantum superposition, the moment
such an observation occurred, the key
would subtly alter, and this alteration
could be detectable with the right
knowhow. And knowledge is power. If you
know whether your encryption key is
observed or not, you can hold off on
sending the private message until you
have confirmed you have an unobserved
key. The message itself can then be
safely transmitted through the regular
channels. This is brilliant. Of course,
getting particles to travel long
distances in a state of superp position
is not actually very easy. If they bump
into an atom along the way, it could
collapse the superp position. But
scientists realized that this problem
could be minimized if most of the
journey was done in a perfect vacuum or
in other words if the particles could be
transmitted through
space. And it is China that first
brought this theory into reality.
Just one month ago, at the time of
writing, on the 19th of March
2025, Chinese scientists announced that
they had broken a record for using a
satellite to distribute a quantum key
between Beijing and a South African
university near Cape Town. To do it,
they used a tiny micro satellite called
MOSI, which sent pairs of entangled
particles across the massive
12,900 km distance. Each individual
entangled pair had a risk of collapsing
on route. But with enough pairs,
recipients on each end could compare
parts of their code and statistically
verify that their particles and thus the
key they were carrying were either
observed or
unobserved. Mosy is only 23 kg, an order
of magnitude smaller than previous
attempts at a quantum satellite. And the
successful completion of its mission
opens the way for an entire distributed
network of interconnected quantum
satellites transferring quantum keys
across the globe so that people can send
messages in
safety. Imagine a world where every
financial transaction, every email, and
the entire internet was completely
unhackable. where true privacy was a
guaranteed fact of life thanks to
watertight encryption. For those who
value such privacy, it will be a
utopia. Or will it be? Is it all a
little too good to be true? There is one
facet of this that gives me pause that
nobody seems to be addressing.
Quantum key distribution works via
satellites distributing quantum keys
which are completely unhackable. All
well and good. But note what I'm saying
there. They distribute the keys, not the
messages themselves.
In my research on this subject, I have
repeatedly seen the assertion that the
encrypted messages can be safely sent
via the normal channels because you are
able to confirm via quantum key
distribution that no one has intercepted
your key. The reason they do this is
because quantum technology is not yet
very good at sending large amounts of
data. A key is fine, but a larger file
is better sent through conventional
means. This is very clever and seems
logically very sound. But how is this
any safer from brute force methods than
current
encryption? Brute force methods work by
guessing keys one after another after
another. They do not work by
intercepting keys. Certainly there are
hacking methods that do work by trying
to intercept the key as this is far
easier than the vast computational power
required by brute force. But if you do
have access to a powerful enough
computer, I've not found an explanation
for why you care if the key is quantum
or not. Either way, it's the encryption
itself that is the defense, not how well
you've hidden the key. I also imagine a
world where hackers don't care if
they're noticed or not. While this would
mean that the secret message was never
sent because a safe key was never found
if hackers just kept their eye on a
satellite, it would effectively deny the
use of that satellite to its owner.
Denial of service attacks are a
nefarious method hackers use to bully
people into giving them what they want.
Imagine if your vastly expensive quantum
satellite could be rendered a useless
hunk of metal because too many messages
were getting intercepted. All in all,
quantum encryption is still working out
some of the kinks. But if you want to
channel. But back to my first concern with quantum satellites. Certainly, you
might point out that most people do not
have access to powerful supercomputers.
So for the average hacker, brute force
methods are simply not an option. But a
new technology is coming that could
change all that. And it is also using
that magic word
quantum. Experts believe that the first
publicly available quantum computer is
just a decade or so away. Quantum
computers likely won't replace all
classical computers. They're a bit
niche, and some general everyday tasks
like browsing the web are actually just
as fast on a classical computer as a
quantum one. But thanks to a quantum
computer's ability to compute using
cqits that can be in a variety of superp
positions at once rather than just bits
that can either be one or zero. There
are certain specific tasks quantum
computers are much faster at scarily
fast, unnervingly fast. And one of the
tasks it's thought they'll be much
better at is brute forcing
encryption. This is not a hypothetical
technology. Quantum computers are
already here in the hands of powerful
corporations and governments. In 2015,
Google claimed that its D-Wave computer
had proven itself 100 million times
faster at performing certain tasks than
a regular desktop computer. For
reference, it supposedly did in a second
what a regular computer would take
10,000 years to do. Think of the
implications of that. Modern encryption
is only safe from brute force methods
because encryption is so complex
nowadays that it would take a computer
thousands of years to work through all
the possibilities for keys. But what
happens when quantum supercomputers get
into the hands of every hacker out
there? When those encryption methods
praised for being safe because they
would take thousands of years to hack
are crackable in moments.
Suddenly no regular encryption is safe
anymore. This is not just me being
alarmist. The US government fears this
too. The International Institute of
Standards and Technology, an agency
within the US Department of Commerce, is
so concerned about the arrival of this
technology that they are telling
companies to start preparing for it now
by changing the fundamental nature of
their encryptions.
After all, although quantum computers
are not here yet, there's nothing to
stop hackers from collecting encrypted
messages and financial data now and then
just holding on to them until the day
arrives that they can get their new
quantum computer from the shops.
Passwords, financial transactions, and
certain sensitive messages will still be
sometimes relevant a decade from now.
And once those messages are all cracked
with ease, a wave of crimes and exposed
secrets will sweep across the
world. But there is hope. The NIST has
been compiling a defense against the
threat posed by quantum computing. And
this defense does not lie in unhackable
quantum keys, but something more
mundane.
Algorithms. Yes, similar in idea to the
algorithms that are protecting
encryption already. However, rather than
protecting messages by scrambling them
with complex mathematical problems that
will take a long time to solve, the NIST
is preparing five algorithms that don't
care how much computational power you
have. For instance, their FIPS 204
standard makes use of mathematical
latises, points in space with an
arbitrary number of dimensions to work
in. The key requires you to find a
particular pattern within the lattice
like locating the specific path in a 5D
maze. As there is no known mathematical
algorithm that can find this path
efficiently, there's no algorithm that
you can give to a quantum computer. They
struggle with the extra dimensions and
can't solve the problem any faster than
a classical computer. To put it simply,
it doesn't matter how strong your
muscles are if you don't know where to
hammer. FIPS 204 is an example of a
quantum resistant or postquantum
algorithm. Companies like NordVPN are
already starting to implement these
forms of postquantum encryption. While
it's not completely rolled out, they're
preparing already for what's to come.
And we're back to where we started. A
new technology has emerged and both
hackers and encryption experts are
handed the same new toys. each made
massive advances in their field. But as
with the rise of computers, the
situation
stabilizes. Computers threatened
privacy, but then ultimately restored
it. Quantum technology both improved
privacy and finds new ways to threaten
it. The cycle of history repeats itself
with developers creating new algorithms
and hackers trying to find points of
weakness. And each success on one side
drives the other to try all the
harder. So have quantum satellites
ushered in an era where privacy is
guaranteed? I highly doubt it. Even if
the key is completely secure, hackers
can always find another way in. But
equally, has quantum computing ripped
down every defense and ended secrecy
forever? I also find myself skeptical.
Brute force might soon be more effective
as a hacking tool, but already companies
and governments are pivoting to new
defenses that can weather the coming
storm. But who can say for sure? Right
now, the future is in a sort of superp
position of its own, both secure and
unsecured, private and public. And much
like all things quantum, that superp
position will only collapse once it is
observed
to this playlist for more Astramm
content. I'll see you next time.