Spy chief issues encryption warning

OTTAWA • The head of Canada’s electronic spy agency warned Friday the advent of super-fast quantum computers will cripple current encryption methods for securing sensitive government and personal information within a decade.

In a rare public speech, Greta Bossenmaier, chief of the Communications Security Establishment, said cryptologists at the CSE and around the world are racing to find new cryptographic standards before Y2Q — years to quantum — predicted for 2026.

She is the third senior CSE official this week to warn publicly of the threat quantum computing poses to widely used public key cryptography (PKC), protecting sensitive data transmissions from hackers, hacktivists, foreign state spies and other malicious actors.

The CSE is best known as a spy agency — it collects, decrypts and analyzes phone calls, faxes, emails, tweets, satellite and other electronic signals emanating from adversarial foreign nations and overseas threat actors. But it’s also mandated to protect government computer systems and networks, and the information they carry.

Already, federal computer systems are “probed” more than 100 million times a day by suspected malicious actors searching for vulnerabilities.

Now, “the challenge of protecting systems is about to get a lot harder thanks to quantum computing,” Bossenmaier told an Ottawa conference of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.

“It’s not really a question of if, it’s a question of when. The clock has started to tick. So unless we collectively get ahead of the quantum challenge and rethink encryption, the systems and information of companies, of governments, of organizations, of citizens — potentially every Canadian citizen — could be vulnerable.”