Controlling physical devices with digital commands securely through the Internet

Internet is the most demanding environment to send operational commands to remote devices
securely.

At the moment, such control is commonly performed using strong encryption algorithms on the
commands. The sent commands then look like long random numbers and the hostile decryption would take vast amounts of time, even with present supercomputers. The algorithms are commonly public, and there is a public key used by the algorithm. The algorithms have been mathematically proven to work right. What the crackers don’t know first is the long private key, a digital number. One friendly device can encrypt the sent commands, and another friendly device at the other end decrypts the commands. If there is only a small difference in the sent commands, the long digital number moving in the Internet looks different each time.

This scenario is now coming to its end. The reason is Quantum Computers, especially based on photons. So the Quantum Computers are approaching the so called Quantum Supremacy. When a Quantum Computer is configured for a certain computational task, it performs vastly faster than even the fastest present supercomputer. This means that the Quantum Computer is able to find the private key, and then decrypt the sent command. This way the speculative crackers can learn to find the way to create false commands and send them to the target device.

If the protection of the delivery of commands is not adequate, the company under attack can
lose the ability to control their key processes. This happened in Norsk Hydro in March 2019 when the control of their aluminum production process was temporarily lost during a cyberattack and even without a hostile quantum computer.

Please read also the two more pages about CyberSec , by selecting a subpage. With a PC browser, click the emerging links to subpages. With a mobile browser, click the Arrow Down icon.