There are concerns that China has built a quantum supercomputer capable of hacking into and breaking through all the cyber-defences used by Western governments.
Concerns were raised after a successful hack by a Chinese government hacking group on June 15 last year.
The group, codenamed Storm-0558, was able to steal 60,000 emails from high-ranking officials in the US government including the country’s commerce secretary Gina Raimondo.
Following the incident, Microsoft, US officials, and America’s cyber defence agency CISA launched an investigation into how the group could have made it through their comprehensive defences.
It was reported that during the investigation, Microsoft considered 46 potential hypotheses.
The CISA report said that one of the possibilities considered was whether the “adversary” possessed “a theoretical quantum computing capability to break public-key cryptography”.
What this means is one of the possibilities they considered was that the Chinese hacking group had been able to forge a digital key, something US officials said was the “cryptographic equivalent of the crown jewels”.
While this has been considered a possibility, the CISA report said that a hack of this nature was the “least likely” scenario.
Microsoft has said that “operational errors” could be to blame for the sizeable hack. In a blog post last month, they said: “Our leading hypothesis remains that operational errors resulted in key material leaving the secure token signing environment.”
Despite this and even if quantum computing is not to blame for the hack, there are increased concerns about the impact of cyber attacks on warfare.
Chief technology officer for cyber security Garrison told the Telegraph: “Offensive use of quantum computing would render most modern techniques to secure data in transit and data at rest useless.
“Because today’s security ecosystem puts so much stock into the strength of encryption algorithms, this would be a disaster.”
The disclosure by the US Government about their hack comes weeks after the UK imposed sanctions on China after what the Government described as “malicious” cyber attacks on the Electoral Commission and MPs.
In a statement, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said: “The UK will not tolerate malicious cyber activity. It is an absolute priority for the UK Government to protect our democratic system and values.”
Former minister Tim Loughton told the BBC that China was “in the business of trying to influence elections and democracies”.
He added: “We need much more robust action to show China that this is absolutely unacceptable and there are consequences and those consequences will be followed through. But at the moment, they’re not.
