Our current online encryption will not be able to withstand a powerful quantum computer. In the future, quantum computers are likely to be so powerful that they will be able to crack the encryption methods we currently use and read our most private secrets: Our chat messages, our credit card payments and even secret business information - they would all suddenly be available for the whole world to see. The reason for this lies in RSA encryption. This was developed in the 1970s by the three mathematicians Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman and is now the most common encryption method for our online communication. The RSA cryptosystem is based on a one-way function with huge prime numbers. However, the mathematician Peter Shor developed quantum algorithms for prime factorization back in the 1990s that could crack this encryption. What is still missing, however, is a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. But that could soon change. In this video, we explain how the principle of superposition and quantum entanglement make the quantum computer so powerful and how quantum bits - known as qubits - differ from the bits in a conventional computer. We also show why hackers are already intercepting our encrypted data even though they can't read it yet (harvest now, decrypt later).

CONTENT:
00:00 Intro
00:49 What are one-way functions?
02:02 RSA encryption
03:31 How a quantum computer works
05:13 What does this mean for my private data?

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