Chip makers are baking post-quantum cryptography acceleration into hardware as the threat of quantum systems breaking current encryption rises.
The technology is still years away from the general market, but defenders are concerned about harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks that could build up stores of data until quantum computing becomes more widely available to exploit it. Security professionals and regulators encourage organizations to begin future-proofing now, and some key players are acting.
"You don't want to be stuck in the harvest now, decrypt later kind of attacks, because the time is not three years out, the time is now," Anand Pashupathy, vice president and general manager for product assurance and security at Intel, said during April's Google Cloud Next conference.
Intel has started providing "PQC capable support" in Xeon 6 server hardware chips to protect against attacks from quantum computers, Pashupathy said.
Intel expects a multi-year journey to transition all of its chips to be PQC-compliant, with the new algorithms coexisting with other encryption such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to handle both quantum and standard web traffic. Intel wants to lock down standard AES Internet traffic with PQC and hardware acceleration by protecting handshakes.
"We're increasing our coverage generation over generation, and by 2029 we'll be ready," Pashupathy said,
Similarly, Nvidia is integrating post-quantum standards into security layers underpinning confidential computing, in which trust and attestation are established for secure exchange of data, Daniel Rohrer, vice president of software security at Nvidia, said at the same conference.
"There's a set of those and we're sort of diligently implementing it, now that they've been approved, into the hardware and other features" Rohrer said.
Upgrading Chips is Just a Start
The Federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardized post-quantum cryptography algorithms in 2024. These were meant to protect digital signatures and encrypt data being transferred over public networks .
PQC is asymmetric and requires a combination of public and private keys, so is structurally designed to resist quantum computing attacks. Other asymmetric encryption techniques, RSA and ECC, are considered vulnerable to quantum attacks.
AES-256 – which is symmetric encryption technology – uses a single shared key to encrypt large amounts of data, such as Internet traffic. It is quantum-resistant, said Nelly Porter, director of product management for GCP Confidential Computing and Encryption.
Hardware-based encryption is faster than software techniques, but it typically takes years for hardware makers to implement the technology into their products. For example, the NIST published AES in 2001 and it went into effect in 2002, but it appeared in AMD and Intel chips only in 2010.
IBM was the first to implement post-quantum encryption accelerators into its hardware with the z16 mainframe, which was released in 2022. It updated the firmware to keep the system compliant with NIST's PQC standards.
Enterprises need to start thinking about protecting systems from quantum attacks now, not later, Porter said at the Google Cloud Next conference.
"Every sensitive bit and byte that you're sending over the wire that's not protected and not quantum resistant can be stored now and decrypted when those computers will become available," Porter said.
Upgrading chips to include PQC is the start, but enterprises should do a full hardware evaluation to protect against quantum attacks, says Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.
"A lot of infrastructure that has encryption built in may be hard to upgrade, or in some cases – perhaps like older networking equipment – impossible to upgrade, so it would need to be replaced," Gold says.
Pashupathy said AES-256 is already accelerated in Intel hardware and should be used to prevent the harvest-now-decrypt-later style of attacks.
"W'll continue providing acceleration for asymmetric encryption and expanding for PQC algorithm acceleration in future generations of our platform," Pashupathy said.