Will Quantum Encryption Arrive Before Quantum Computers Break All Our Passwords?

Scientists are racing to deploy foolproof quantum encryption before quantum computers come along that render all our passwords useless.
Passwords work today because the computers we have, while theoretically capable of breaking passwords, would take an impractical amount of time to do so.
"The encryption schemes today are based on factoring and on prime numbers, so if you had a computer that could factor instantly, if it did that today it could break all encryption schemes," said David Awshalom, an experimental physicist at the University of Chicago's Institute of Molecular Engineering.
"Quantum machines do a few things extremely well—a few—and one of them is factoring. They can factor exponentially faster than any machine today. And so there’s a lot of concern that, for example, whichever country has a quantum machine, they can break classic encryptions."
And so the race is on. Most major technology companies have a quantum information program striving to develop a quantum computer. Google is working on one using a superconducting chip. Australia, Europe, Japan and China have national programs, Awshalom said.
And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken a personal interest:
Before anyone develops a computer that can factor the daylights out of a password in a split second, scientists like Awshalom are striving to perfect foolproof quantum encryption.
"We’re working very hard on that," Awshalom said at "Future Science: Small Scale, Big Impact," a TED-style talk at the University of Chicago this month. "That’s something that naturally comes out of this field that’s already being prototyped in Washington and Boston. So it will happen. It’s great for us, to protect our information."
Swiss officials have used quantum encryption to secure election results since 2007, use it now for secure banking transactions, and Swiss scientists have been leaders in the field. On his website, University of Geneva physicist Nicholas Gisin explains quantum encryption:
Secure communications such as credit card transactions rely on keys, or codes used to encrypt or decipher a message. Quantum cryptography, a way of exploiting the laws of quantum physics to secure key transfers… lies at the heart of quantum communication, which is the art of transferring quantum states, or qubits, from one place to another.
The unique property of quantum cryptography is the ability to detect an eavesdropper during a key transaction. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that measuring one property in a quantum state disturbs another; that is, any attempt to decipher the key will be immediately detected.
Scientists have been working on transferring keys between the sender and the recipient using a stream of photons, which can be transmitted across existing fiber-optic lines.
"Lots of startups are using simple fiber networks around the world to do that," Awshalom said.
The process is not foolproof yet. Some errors occur in communication, and at least one experimental snoop was able to go undetected by blending into those errors. But scientists are working to reduce the occurrence of such errors and to increase reliability across longer distances and in longer strings of information.
Quantum encryption seems to be winning the race, but according to Awshalom, everyone who tries to predict the arrival of quantum computing is wrong: there's no telling when quantum computers will arrive.
"I’m very confident there will be quantum machines," he said. "There’s been in the last few years a big transition between research laboratories and industry."