Post-Quantum Digital Forensics: Investigating Cybercrime in a Quantum-Compromised Landscape

Although quantum computing poses a number of opportunities, it also represents an emergent threat to conventional cryptographic practices, particularly to digital forensics in cybercrime prosecution. While post-quantum cryptanalysis is still in its infancy, early stages of quantum supremacy are being achieved. As feature sets of quantum computing develop, substantial emerging technologies are expected to be available in the next five years, including Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms. While the former can be used for the fast factoring of large integers, this implies that public-key cryptographic systems will be efficiently calculable, facilitating the detection of digital communication channels. Simultaneously, this allows encrypted data storage to be broken, undermining claims protection. Meta data, for example, phone numbers dialed, contact lists or text length, is vulnerable through Grover’s algorithm, which provides a quadratic acceleration of brute force attacks.