Apple's security and privacy protocols are marquee features of its brand. It's litigated over them, it's defended them against political and legal intrusion, it uses them to market itself. It takes this stuff really, really seriously. So seriously, in fact, it just announced what it says is "the most significant cryptographic security upgrade" ever for its iMessage text messaging system. It's designed for a "post-quantum" future. Aha. What?

The word "quantum" may evoke a number of images--possibly involving cats in boxes, or a scientist leaping improbably through time. It may also prompt a "huh?" It's a highly scientific word, after all, and frequently misunderstood. What Apple is specifically talking about here is quantum computing, and how it may impact all our lives--possibly soon, and definitely later. That's because quantum computing, among all sorts of exciting potential benefits, represents a real threat to the encryption technology that keeps our digital lives relatively secure and private right now. 

Apple's text messaging system, iMessage, relies on a form of encryption to safeguard all your private words, business plans, personal photos, and videos so that when they're sent from your phone to someone else's phone they're jumbled and garbled as they travel. Only when the messages arrive at their proper end point are they decrypted.

To boil it down to its simplest form, this encryption relies on the limitations of today's computers. To encrypt a message Apple basically sets a really hard math problem. If you gave an encrypted message that lacked the right decryption key to a supercomputer and said "keep trying until you crack the math problem" it would eventually be able to. This is called a brute force attack. But it would take a ridiculously long time to do so: years, decades of endless computing. It sounds wonderfully safe.

Enter the quantum computer.

Quantum leaps, coming soon

Quantum computers are in their earliest experimental forms right now. Unlike the little logical slivers of silicon that, with tiny "on/off" bits of electrical current, power your office laptop, smartphone and so on, quantum computers include a little glimmer of quantum mechanics. This is the bizarre, improbable physics of how ultra-small particles interact with the universe. It means quantum computers aren't limited to having single "on" or "off" logical decisions happening at one time because, weirdly, the "qubits" (which are equivalent to the "bits" in a traditional silicon chip) in a quantum computer can exist in more than one state at once. The practical upshot of this is that these computers can process vast amounts of information at once, or compute problems unbelievably quickly. So quickly that they could put at risk the safety of the tricky math problems that power today's encryption.

Practical, everyday quantum computers are some ways from hitting the market, which is probably a good thing for security reasons. And though Apple's blog post notes its current encryption hasn't been broken, the company has realized that when quantum computers do arrive, all earlier encrypted messages may be up for grabs. So it's rebuilt "the iMessage cryptographic protocol from the ground up to advance the state of the art in end-to-end encryption" ahead of ubiquitous quantum computing power so that "communication is protected from current and future adversaries." In essence, Apple made the math problems that govern its encryption much, much harder to break--even with a quantum computer.

From an end-user's viewpoint, you'll likely see no change from Apple's innovation at all. The tech is supposed to be invisible. But as well as being another reminder that you really need to be on top of your company's digital security matters to prevent against current hack attacks, Apple's move highlights that maybe you should also be thinking about how possible future security threats may impact your business. Barring the stable door before the horse has bolted is always a good idea.