“Is your company ready for quantum communication? “. This is the question posed by the prestigious Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in a study which shows that this set of technologies should enter, from 2025, an adoption stage that will concern the private sector.
Carried out by six consultants and associates, including two French – Jean-François Bobier (X, Telecom and former IBM) and Cassia Naudet-Baulieu (ESPCI Paris, Normal Sup), the study distinguishes three phases of take-off of quantum communication.
The first, in progress, runs from 2015 to 2025. It is currently driven by public and military investments, and still mainly affects research.
The second, to come, will therefore concern more companies – which should see the maturity and democratization of quantum chips for generating truly random numbers (QRNG for Quantum Random Number Generators) by 2030.
The third stage, a priori after 2030, will be that of the operational availability of new technologies such as quantum repeaters (for entanglement transfers and thus extending the distance of a quantum communication link), quantum memories, and error correction algorithms for quantum systems.
Difference Between Quantum Communication and Post-Quantum Cryptography
For BCG, by 2030, the quantum communication market as a whole is expected to reach between $4 billion and $6 billion. A figure to which will be added the post-quantum cryptography market of 4 to 5 billion.
The consulting firm cuts the future of securing communications into three main parts.
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) covers new classic encryption protocols – “non-quantum”, insists the BCG – capable of resisting quantum attacks thanks to new mathematical methods.
Quantum communication – which relies on the intrinsic physical properties of particles – covers quantum key distribution (QKD for Quantum Key Distribution) and QNRG technologies.
“Post-quantum cryptography and quantum communications could replace current protocols as early as 2030, but more likely by 2035.”
BCG
For the record, quantum key distribution consists of transmitting a private key in an ultra-secure manner between two interlocutors using superposition (and often entanglement). Private key that is then used in traditional encryption protocols and channels. Note that quantum communication is also used to connect quantum systems to each other (sensors, processors, etc.) as Eleni Diamanti recently pointed out on LeMagIT.
QNRG technologies – “which Samsung has already deployed in high-end smartphones”, underlines the BCG – are another aspect of the use of the quantum properties of matter which is, by nature, at the subatomic scale, random and probabilistic (“God plays dice”, as Niels Bohr could have concluded in the face of Albert Einstein).
The uses of these truly random numbers are both promising and numerous, predicts BCG. The consulting firm cites Finance (with, for example, more precise Monte-Carlo simulations), IoT or telecoms. And more broadly, with the arrival of turnkey SoCs, all companies for their encryption needs.
Track the maturity of quantum communication technologies today
“After more than four decades of stability thanks to RSA encryption and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, governments, companies and investors must prepare for quantum communications and ensure a new level of security for data transfers” invite the authors of the study.
“Post-quantum cryptography and quantum communications could replace current protocols as early as 2030, but more likely by 2035,” continues BCG, which concludes that all organizations – public and private – will need to implement one or more of these technologies to maintain the security of their communications.
Conclusion: even if the technology is still “in the making” and that the horizon of 2035 is still far away, organizations have every interest, today, “to follow the maturity of the technologies that will be deployed” tomorrow. Under penalty of playing dice with the future of their securities?
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