"China's Ultimate Weapon Against Earth?"
Based on that title alone, what would you guess I'm referring to?
I'll admit, there are almost too many possibilities to imagine. China possesses nearly limitless resources and severely limited ethics.
In many ways, China's military is the closest competitor to the U.S. military. Just ask our resident defense expert Jason Simpkins all the countless ways China could pose a threat to global security.
But the threat I'm talking about has nothing to do with bombs and missiles.
China could also go scorched earth and use its awesome economic influence as a battering ram, forcing the U.S. to comply. The threat of losing our biggest manufacturing mecca would send the global economy into a tailspin.
But thanks to mutually assured destruction, that's not the biggest threat China poses. President Xi would never tank his economy in the same way Russia is continuing to do.
China's most powerful weapon could completely destabilize enemy countries, leaving allies unscathed.
It could destroy economies, influence politicians, and steal the most priceless secrets from any world power.
It's not an exaggeration to say that if left unchecked, this power could establish China as the most dominant force on Earth.
It's a threat that has been looming ever since one groundbreaking new piece of technology went mainstream.
But last month, that changed. China's greatest weapon isn't coming in decades - it could be here this year.
This battle won't be fought in the physical world. China's greatest superweapon does its damage in the digital world instead.
According to recent reports, China has managed to create a powerful quantum algorithm that can crunch enough data to break standard RSA-2048 encryption.
RSA-2048 is used in practically every data security use case on Earth. It's part of the foundation of modern cybersecurity.
In a nutshell, the protocol scrambles sensitive data into an unreadable form using extremely difficult math problems, which the intended receiver can quickly solve (thus decoding the data) with an encryption key.
Whenever you enter personal information into an HTTPS-secure website or app - be it your Social Security number, the password to your online bank account, or an email to your doctor - you're trusting RSA to keep that information hidden from prying eyes.
Like any encryption algorithm, RSA is theoretically breakable. There has always been a risk that a hacker could decrypt it by manually solving its math problems through trial and error. But doing so would theoretically take an unimaginably long time for typical computers.