New Research Tackles Future of Encryption in the Age of Quantum Computing
BU-led Team Pioneers Physics-inspired Scheme for Computation on Encrypted Data at Scale
Today’s encryption faces mounting risks—from escalating cyberattacks to the looming threat of quantum computing. As digital systems grow more complex and reliant on cloud and third-party services, vulnerabilities multiply. JP Morgan, for instance, reports that it blocks 45 billion hacking attempts daily.
But the bigger threat is on the horizon: “Q-Day”—the point at which quantum computers could break widely used encryption standards like RSA-2048 in just a day, a feat classical supercomputers would take millennia to achieve. In preparation, adversaries are already stockpiling encrypted data in “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, waiting for the moment quantum decryption becomes possible.
To address this, a multidisciplinary team led by Boston University is pioneering a fundamentally new approach to encryption, inspired by the physics of complex systems. With collaborators at Cornell University and the University of Central Florida, and support from a $3.6M National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research award, the team recently published key insights in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) .
The proposed method, called Encrypted Operator Computing (EOC), merges physics, computer science, and mathematics to develop scalable methods for computing directly on encrypted data—long considered the holy grail of cryptography. While the EOC method is designed to work on classical computers doing classical computations, the researchers expect it to be inherently resistant to quantum attacks as well.
“This work introduces a true paradigm shift,” says principal investigator Andrei Ruckenstein, a physicist and BU College of Arts & Sciences distinguished professor of physics. “It provides new capabilities made possible only through diverse disciplines forging a fundamental change in thinking.”
Ruckenstein coauthored this PNAS paper with co-principal investigators Claudio Chamon, a CAS professor of physics; Ran Canetti, a CAS professor of computer science; and Eduardo R. Mucciolo, a professor of physics at the University of Central Florida.
Canetti, Chamon, and Ruckenstein were able to advance the work with the support of the Hariri Institute’s Quantum Convergence Focused Research Program, which facilitates convergent thinking and multidisciplinary collaborations across BU on crosscutting themes around quantum science and engineering. All three BU researchers are affiliated with the institute.
Learn more in the story published in The Brink.