Tech warning: Albanese government must act on quantum threat: Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince

The Biden administration has mandated government agencies to prepare for quantum computers that could be used by hackers to break encryption, and Australia is being urged to follow suit.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. Picture: Supplied

The Albanese government is being urged to consider the cyber security implications of quantum computing technologies, amid concerns that China’s rapid advancement in quantum technologies will allow foreign powers to crack complex encryption codes and potentially make defence hardware redundant.

The government is set to reveal its quantum strategy within weeks, and security officials have warned that black hat hackers are increasingly storing data knowing that in the future they’ll be able to decrypt it.

The Biden administration recently mandated government agencies – and is encouraging the private sector – to prepare for quantum computers that could break encryption in the future of data stolen today.

“We are determined that the national quantum strategy be the beginning of a conversation, not a punctuation mark before moving on to the next thing,” Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic said in a speech last month.

“It should set a vision and principles to shape Australia’s leadership that can be built on for years to come.”

Cloudflare’s global co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said in an interview that the potential threat of quantum computing is growing, and it’s a threat that security executives don’t know what to do about.

Mr Prince’s company, which owns a massive network of servers and provides web security and other services for about 20 per cent of the entire internet and counts Atlassian and Canva as customers, has announced it will provide post-quantum cryptography for free by default. While quantum technologies are likely still a decade away, it’s crucial to get ahead of the issue, he said.

“There are companies out there that want to charge exorbitant amounts to prepare for future attacks from quantum computers. We believe that privacy should be a human right and that post-quantum security should be the new baseline for the internet … We think it should be free, and we’re calling on the rest of the industry to follow our lead and make their latest cryptography technology free,” Mr Prince said.

“We’re also committing to making any of the research we do or the technologies we develop open source in a royalty-free way because anyone who wants to use them should be able to.”

The executive said that over 1 billion HTTP requests have been protected with post-quantum cryptography by Cloudflare since 2019.

He said the other key issue facing regulators and governments more generally is the concept of an open internet, which is standing at a crossroads, particularly in places like Russia and Iran.

Matthew Prince, chief executive and co-founder of Cloudflare, which has cut ties with Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. Picture: Bloomberg News

“The challenge the internet is facing today is that China never had an open internet, they never let the horse out of the barn, and everywhere else in the world had a very open internet. What you’re seeing today is somewhere like Russia, and Iran, authoritarian regimes in those places are basically trying to put the horse back into the barn and the battle over the next 12 months and several years is going to be countries following the China playbook, and censoring their own people’s access to the internet.”

Cloudflare found itself in the middle of a global controversy last year when it blocked Kiwi Farms, a far-right internet forum that gained a reputation for hate speech, transphobic content and violent threats from some of its users. That issue sparked debate around who is responsible for online content and where responsibility lies for take harmful or hateful content offline.

“Even though 20 to 25 per cent of the web sits behind us, there have been three major incidents over the past 12 years of the company’s history, or about once every four years on average, that one of these things come up,” Mr Prince said.

“For the most part it’s pretty straightforward, it’s mostly content that is illegal, either globally, or in a certain country. In reality, it’s pretty rare when a platform like Facebook, or the web host, haven’t been able to control things, and so it falls to us to do it.

“I think that it’s important to understand the different layers of the internet, and I think that all the conversations that we have had with regulators, the conversations that we have had with customers, it’s actually been really productive and useful.”