IBM Blockchain Vice President: Half of Cryptocurrency Projects Will Die

At the IBM Think 2019 conference, Jesse Lund, Vice President of IBM Blockchain and Digital Currency, said,

“This threat is the reverse engineering of the private keys that represent control of the wallet. Your public key is essentially your wallet, which holds your balance. I think this is a real and credible threat. Bitcoin is a public ledger. So you can see which public keys hold the largest balances and target those public keys (holding hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins). For example, I spent a lot of work (computing resources) to reverse solve the public and private keys. I think this is even a short-term threat. ”

Quantum computers may one day be able to reverse engineer the corresponding private key from the public key, making existing forms of public key encryption vulnerable. Lund believes that at least half of the blockchain will be affected.

Quantum computing threats will extend to nearly all cryptographic systems, such as communications, smart cars, personal devices, and private and government databases, panellists said. To mitigate the threat of quantum computing to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most other cryptocurrencies, IBM’s team believes that organizations behind these projects should immediately begin quantum-proofing their systems.

Nev Zunic, chief technology officer of IBM Data Security Services, said coders should start dealing with quantum threats now.

“Businesses need to be aware of quantum computing and the risks it can pose so they can take action today to avoid being hacked at some point in their product’s lifecycle. ”

The new quantum era we are entering is putting a shelf life on the encryption technologies we use today, said Michael Osborne, manager of the security and privacy team at IBM Research in Switzerland.

He said:

“For any system that operates very complexly--because you need everyone involved, you can't wait until there is a threat to figure out how to migrate. These things should be planned ahead of time. ”

“We don’t have 30 years left, the risks are too high. The advantages of quantum computing will break this situation. ”

Zunic said this threat could take 10 years or more to arrive. But he added that data transmitted today could be affected by quantum computing tomorrow.

“Another issue to consider is that any encrypted communication that occurs today could be intercepted today and stored for later decryption. Therefore, if there is a transfer of sensitive information between government agencies, organizations and financial transactions - this information can be intercepted, stored and decrypted in the future. Therefore, businesses need to be aware of this today and start taking action today to secure themselves against potential quantum attacks in the future. ”

(Source: Babbitt)