If you have ever digitised anything – bank details, your faceID or a text conversation with your mum – you have an encryption key.

This number with thousands of digits acts like a cipher for every “message” that you send over the internet, including online shopping and browsing social media. It is created by multiplying two large prime numbers to produce a third number.

To decrypt your cipher, a hacker must factorise the third number: that is, find those two original prime numbers. This would take a classical computer the same amount of time as the universe’s existence.

Professor Nalini Joshi has been named the NSW Scientist of the Year. Credit: Sam Mooy

But quantum computers can factorise these massive encryption keys increasingly quickly. And, as these quantum computers become fa

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