IBM Makes World’s First Quantum-Safe Tape Drive; Critical for Banking & Financial Industries

(Blocks&Files) IBM is developing cryptographic security measures to protect archived data against attacks by quantum computers. Vadim Lyubashevsky, a cryptographer at IBM Research, said: “IBM Research has been developing cryptographic algorithms that are designed to be resistant to the potential security concerns posed by quantum computers.”
IBM Research is working with IBM’s tape development teams to implement new encryption algorithms in a TS1160 tape drive’s firmware. It seems a long technology journey between the far shores of quantum computing and the humble tape drive. Why the fuss? the idea of tape as a possible attack target seems odd – until we realise that the IBM mainframes used by banks will have IBM tape drives. Also, the IBM Cloud organisation is involved and tape is used for archiving data in its public cloud. Banks and other organisations with lots of sensitive archived information need to prepare now and deploy new encryption algorithms designed to defeat quantum computer attacks.