France, May 22 -- Cryptography is what allows us to protect sensitive data and communications and is foundational to how our modern world works. The power of quantum computing, deployed in a brute force manner, means that the resilience of many of the algorithms we've used for decades to protect data is now under question. Current mechanisms used for authentication, digital signatures and trust chains in identity documents are particularly vulnerable because they rely on asymmetric cryptography like RSA and ECC. Also known as public key cryptography, these mechanisms work by creating a pair of keys - one public and one private. Anyone can use a public key to encrypt data, but only the holders of the corresponding private key can decrypt tha...