The cryptopocalypse is nigh! NIST rolls out new encryption standards to prepare

In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse.

Some of the most widely used public-key encryption systems—including those using the RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman algorithms—rely on mathematics to protect sensitive data. These mathematical problems include (1) factoring a key's large composite number (usually denoted as N) to derive its two factors (usually denoted as P and Q) and (2) computing the discrete logarithm that key is based on.