Crypto’s first quantum attack will look like an unexplained breach: Quantus founder

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.

Smith’s warning comes as advances in quantum algorithms have reduced estimates of computing resources needed to attack the elliptic-curve cryptography used by major blockchains. 

First target may not be Satoshi’s Bitcoin 

Much of the fear around Q-day in crypto is what will happen if a quantum computer cracks the keys securing Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated Bitcoin holdings, worth $63 billion at the time of writing, which could be suddenly dumped on the market.