Understanding a known-plaintext attack A known-plaintext attack (KPA) occurs when a hacker uses pairs of both encrypted and unencrypted data to figure out the encryption algorithm or key. In this ...

• AES (Advanced Encryption Standard): AES is a symmetric encryption algorithm widely used in government and industry. It offers key lengths of 128, 192 and 256 bits, providing strong security.

Widely used encryption algorithms like RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) will be pointless. Depending on who is running the quantum computers, they will turn from superhero to supervillain.

These algorithms, marking a critical step towards “post-quantum cryptography” for US government contractors, will establish an international standard for protecting everything from national ...