Inventors of Quantum Cryptography Win Turing Award
Source: Schneier on Security
Award Announcement
Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography.
Reflection on the Recognition
I am incredibly pleased to see them receive this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I consider it largely unnecessary.
2008 Essay: “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless”
I wrote my thoughts back in 2008 in an essay titled “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless”.
While I like the science of quantum cryptography—my undergraduate degree was in physics—I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system.
Security is a chain; it’s as strong as the weakest link. Mathematical cryptography, as bad as it sometimes is, is the strongest link in most security chains. Our symmetric and public‑key algorithms are pretty good, even though they’re not based on much rigorous mathematical theory. The real problems are elsewhere: computer security, network security, user interface and so on.
Cryptography is the one area of security that we can get right. We already have good encryption algorithms, good authentication algorithms and good key‑agreement protocols. Maybe quantum cryptography can make that link stronger, but why would anyone bother? There are far more serious security problems to worry about, and it makes much more sense to spend effort securing those.
As I’ve often said, it’s like defending yourself against an approaching attacker by putting a huge stake in the ground. It’s useless to argue about whether the stake should be 50 feet tall or 100 feet tall, because either way, the attacker is going to go around it. Even quantum cryptography doesn’t “solve” all of cryptography: the keys are exchanged with photons, but a conventional mathematical algorithm takes over for the actual encryption.
Views on Quantum Computation
I’m not worried; the math is ahead of the physics. Reports of progress in that area are overblown. If a security crisis were to arise because of a quantum‑computing breakthrough, it would be due to a lack of crypto‑agility in our systems.