Store Now, Decrypt Later: Which Data Is at Risk?

About this interactive

For a lot of data, such as most websites, we are not worried about security 10 years from now. We use the standards that are secure today, and that is enough. But current encryption standards meet our current needs, not our needs 10 years from now. Computers, software and hardware keep getting faster, cryptanalysis keeps improving, and quantum computing could change the timeline sharply. That creates the store-now, decrypt-later threat. An attacker intercepts encrypted communication today and simply keeps it. They cannot read it yet, and they do not need to: if the information is still sensitive in 5 or 10 years, they can decrypt it then. The video says quantum computing is set up well to crack ciphers. More precisely, a large enough quantum computer would mainly threaten public-key cryptography, such as RSA, Diffie-Hellman and elliptic-curve algorithms, which today's connections use to agree their keys. Symmetric ciphers with long keys, such as AES-256, are expected to hold. That is still enough for store now, decrypt later: break a recorded key exchange, and everything it protected can be read. So the question for each piece of data is how long it must stay secret. Data that will have expired, been published or stopped mattering is fine with today's standards. Data that will still be sensitive in 5 or 10 years or more needs thinking at a level greater than today's typical encryption.

What you'll learn

Decide whether data needs protection beyond today's standard encryption by asking how long it must stay secret, given the store-now-decrypt-later threat
Explain why future computing, quantum computing among it, raises the stakes for secrets that must last 5 or 10 years or more, while short-lived data needs only today's standards

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

1.4 Explain the importance of using appropriate cryptographic solutions.

ISC2 CISSP

3.6 Select and determine cryptographic solutions

NIST 800-53

SC-13 Cryptographic Protection

ISC2 CC

5.1 Understand data security

Key terms

Store-Now-Decrypt-Later: A threat model in which an adversary captures and stores encrypted data today with the intent to decrypt it in the future using more powerful computing, such as quantum systems.
Quantum Computing: A computing paradigm that uses quantum mechanical phenomena to perform calculations, posing a significant future threat to current cryptographic standards.
Encryption: The process of converting readable data into an unreadable format using an algorithm and key to prevent unauthorized access.
Cryptanalysis: The art of reverse engineering or decrypting encoded messages without full knowledge of the cipher or key used.
Confidentiality: The principle that information is accessible only to those authorized to access it.

Topics

Store Now Decrypt Later Quantum Computing Encryption Interactive Streak Sort

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