Cryptographers, quantum computers and the war for information

I'm in the business
of safeguarding secrets,

and this includes your secrets.

Cryptographers are
the first line of defense

in an ongoing war that's been
raging for centuries,

a war between codemakers and codebreakers.

And this is a war on information.

The modern battlefield
for information is digital,

and it wages across your phones,

your computers and the internet.

Our job is to create systems that scramble
your emails and credit card numbers,

your phone calls and text messages,

and that includes those saucy selfies,

so that all of this information
can only be de-scrambled

by the recipient that it's intended for.

Now until very recently,

we thought we'd won this war for good.

Right now, each of your smartphones
is using encryption

that we thought was unbreakable
and that was going to remain that way.

We were wrong,

because quantum computers are coming

and they're going to change
the game completely.

Throughout history,
cryptography and codebreaking

has always been this game
of cat and mouse.

Back in the 1500s,

Queen Mary of the Scots thought she
was sending encrypted letters

that only her soldiers could decipher,

but Queen Elizabeth of England,

she had codebreakers
that were all over it.

They decrypted Mary's letters,

saw that she was attempting
to assassinate Elizabeth,

and subsequently
they chopped Mary's head off.

A few centuries later, in World War II,

the Nazis communicated
using the Engima code,

a much more complicated encryption scheme
that they thought was unbreakable,

but then good old Alan Turing,

the same guy who invented
what we now call the modern computer,

he built a machine and used it
to break Enigma.

He deciphered the German messages

and helped to bring Hitler
and his Third Reich to a halt.