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Already, federal computer systems are “probed” more than 100 million time a day by suspected malicious actors searching for vulnerabilities.

Potentially every Canadian citizen could be vulnerable

Now, “the challenge of protecting systems is about to get a lot harder thanks to quantum computing,” Bossenmaier told an Ottawa conference of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.

“Nearly every company, nearly every organization, nearly every government currently employs some form of encryption,” she said. “It’s also part of almost every Canadians’ daily life, whether we know it or not. Our credit cards, debit cards, work and building passes, just to name a few examples, all work on some form of encryption.

“It’s not really a question of if, it’s a question of when. The clock has started to tick. So unless we collectively get ahead of the quantum challenge and rethink encryption, the systems and information of companies, of governments, of organizations, of citizens — potentially every Canadian citizen — could be vulnerable.”

Her warnings follow remarks Monday by David Sabourin, CSE’s manager of cryptographic security.

He told a Toronto conference on quantum-safe computing if the 2026 Y2Q prediction holds, “we’re in trouble,” according to an IT World Canada report.

Scott Jones, CSE’s deputy chief of IT security, responsible for securing federal information systems, reportedly told the gathering, “I think we are already behind.”

Quantum computing is based on quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that explores and explains the set of laws governing the atomic and subatomic world of atoms, electrons, photons and other particles. While traditional computers use long strings of bits to encode either a zero or a one, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits.