Crypto’s first quantum attack will look like unexplained breach: Quantus founder
Bad actors with access to a cryptography-breaking quantum computer probably won’t try to announce it to the world by hacking Satoshi Nakamoto’s high-profile Bitcoin wallets, crypto executives say.
The first sign that quantum computing has broken modern cryptography probably won’t be a splashy theft of Satoshi Nakamoto’s dormant Bitcoin. It could just be a wave of unrelated crypto wallet breaches with no trace of how an attacker did it, according to the founder of blockchain startup Quantus.
“When someone cracks your key, you don’t get a memo saying how they did it,” Christopher Smith, CEO and co-founder of Quantus Network, told Cointelegraph. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from public keys exposed onchain, allowing an attacker to move funds without compromising a wallet, device or exchange’s internal systems.
This makes the arrival of “Q-day” — a hypothetical future moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard public-key cryptography — unusually difficult to detect. In a theft involving a highly secure organization, “the only forensic evidence would be that there was no breach,” Smith said.