Quantum-enabled retrospective deanonymisation¶
Encryption may be strong today, but quantum computers don’t care about your upload date.
Right now, data flows around the internet like pollen in spring — drifting, collecting, and sticking to everything. A lot of it is encrypted: emails, health records, private messages, the password you keep reusing with increasingly desperate variations. And that’s comforting… until you realise that someone might be stockpiling all of it — not to read today, but to read later, once the tools catch up.
Enter the quantum computer — a theoretical beast that doesn’t just break encryption, it dismantles it with flair. Unlike today’s machines, which would take centuries to crack modern encryption, quantum computers could (in theory) breeze through it in hours or minutes, thanks to a little something called Shor’s algorithm.
This means adversaries — particularly well-funded, patient ones — can hoover up encrypted data now, even if they can’t make sense of it yet. Health records, activist emails, whistleblower reports, messages from regimes past — all carefully wrapped in digital secrecy and stored in a vault labelled “To Be Opened Eventually.”
So while your messages might be safely composted today, they could bloom again in unfortunate ways — stripped of anonymity, context, and your consent.