NEW DELHI: A task force constituted by the Department of Science & Technology (DST) has recommended that India’s critical sectors including government, defence, power, telecom, transport, and banking and finance begin a phased switch to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
The panel warned that the encryption currently protecting the country’s most sensitive data could soon be broken by mature quantum computers.
Failure to act within the current window, the report warns, “may result in irreversible compromise of confidential data, erosion of trust in digital governance, exposure of financial systems, and forced emergency migration under crisis conditions.”
PQC refers to a new generation of encryption algorithms designed to run on ordinary computers but engineered to withstand attacks from future quantum machines.
While conventional computers operate on binary logic, quantum computers are unconstrained by it, allowing them to theoretically crack public-key cryptography (which currently secures everything from bank transactions to government communications) in a fraction of the time.