Trend Technology 10: encryption hidden in noisy multi-dimensional lattices

Summary

Lattice-based cryptography is the tenth emerging technology in the report, designed to withstand attacks from future quantum computers. The chapter opens with the threat known as harvest-now-decrypt-later, in which encrypted traffic is stored today in the hope of reading it once quantum machines can break current mathematical protections. Instead of simply building a stronger lock, lattice schemes change the underlying problem. Data is encoded within a huge multi-dimensional grid of mathematical points, and small random errors are deliberately added during encryption, like a fog. From outside, the true solution is very hard to tell apart from many plausible wrong ones, even for powerful classical or quantum computers. The same properties also enable fully homomorphic encryption, which lets computation run on data that stays encrypted throughout.