'No matter what password you use, I will break it in a fraction of a second'

ByYONAH JEREMY BOB, JERUSALEM POST PODCASTSJULY 27, 2026 11:15Watch this episode without interruptions.Every method of encryption in use today is living on borrowed time.That was the message from Prof. Maj.-Gen. (res.) Isaac Ben-Israel, among the founders of Israel's modern cybersecurity apparatus, former head of the Israel Space Agency and head of several programs at Tel Aviv University, speaking to the Jerusalem Post Podcast as part of a series on cyber warfare and artificial intelligence."No matter what password you use, in a fraction of a second I will break it," he said, describing what a mature quantum computer will do to the protections that banks, governments, and militaries rely on.Why quantum breaks everythingOrdinary computers run on transistors that hold either a one or a zero. Quantum computers exploit the fact that a particle can occupy two states, or two places, at once, which means, Ben-Israel explained, that a calculation which would take a conventional machine a year, or a thousand years, could be finished almost instantly.He is not talking about being 100 or 1,000 times faster. He put the gap at something closer to 10 to the power of 20 or 30, a number, he noted, that we all know how to write down and none of us can really picture.Quantum computing does not make hackers better at breaking in. It destroys the encryption protecting what they find once they are inside. The brute-force attack, trying every possible combination of digits, letters, and symbols until the password falls, becomes trivial.Quantum communication vs. quantum computingThere are two completely separate areas of quantum theory where people are making big strides. One is quantum communication, which means sending signals from space to Earth in a different kind of encryption, and the other is quantum computing.When exploring the field of quantum communication, there are a few aspects that need to be considered.The first fix is new mathematics: post-quantum algorithms that even a quantum machine cannot crack in reasonable time. A few already exist, Ben-Israel said, but they are slow, and none are ready for wide use. According to the professor, they will likely be adapted very slowly, as industry experts expect around a 10-year lag for adopting the new encryption.The second is stranger, and in his view, where the world will eventually end up. Quantum entanglement allows something done on one computer to register on another, however far away, with nothing traveling in between: no wire, no Wi-Fi, no signal moving at the speed of light. There is nothing to intercept, and no password to steal.China has already put a satellite in orbit that sends messages to the ground this way. Tel Aviv University students launched a satellite two years ago as an early step toward the same goal. Ben-Israel, who recently co-wrote a book on the philosophical puzzle quantum theory presents, conceded the physics is hard to accept. "Technically, it works, even if you have difficulty understanding how it works."How long?Ben-Israel's estimate: roughly ten years to solve the main obstacle, which is interference between the quantum elements. The more you add, the worse it gets.But he was careful about what "ready" means. These will be enormous machines, kept in ultracold conditions, drawing so much electricity that big tech companies are already investing in nuclear power to feed them and their AI systems. "There will be no more than a few in the world. It's not something you can buy and put on your desk." A quantum computer in every home, he said, is more than 50 years away, if ever.From a 1992 unit to Netanyahu's deskBen-Israel initiated what would today be called the IDF's offensive cyber unit in 1992, which he believes was the first of its kind anywhere. For years the field stayed inside intelligence circles, unmentionable in public.Stuxnet changed that. Being a highly sophisticated, state-sponsored computer worm, considered the world's first true digital weapon, it was designed by the US and Israel to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.His answer was not technology or a new agency. It was that Israel had to come out of the closet, to build an ecosystem spanning the security establishment, academia, education, and industry. Netanyahu took some convincing.The closer, oddly, was a novel: a cyber-war thriller by French-Jewish author Philippe Goldstein in which a conflict between China and Taiwan spirals toward world war. Netanyahu initially refused to read fiction. Ben-Israel suggested he take it on a flight to London to meet the British prime minister. He came back and appointed him head of the National Cyber Initiative.Once it became known that Iran's centrifuges had been wrecked by manipulating the computers controlling their rotation, the cyber attack went public, and then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Ben-Israel what could be done to protect Israel.Cyber and AI in the Iran warBoth were used heavily against Iran, Ben-Israel said. Intelligence today sits on computers, so hacking those computers is intelligence work. If media reports are accurate, one method used to time a strike on Iran's senior leadership involved breaking into the systems that control traffic cameras at Tehran junctions and tracking license plates to determine when the targets were all in one place.Other operations caused physical damage rather than stealing data: The Stuxnet model. Many Iranian missiles and drones were intercepted far from Israel's borders using interceptors, electronic warfare, and, where the vehicles had onboard computers and communications, hacking. The Hezbollah pager operation, he said, was the clearest example of what became possible: "the imagination is the limit."AI did the work no human team could. Iran is vast, and a ballistic missile launcher can fire from anywhere. Combining satellite imagery meter by meter would take thousands of analysts thousands of years. A model trained to recognize launchers does it in a fraction of a second. The five-minute alerts Israelis received before the sirens, he said, would not have been possible without it. "It saves a lot of lives."Israel started late on AIBen-Israel was blunt about a failure. He co-headed a national AI initiative with the same mandate he had been given on cyber: get Israel into the world's top five. Some 300 people worked on the report, submitted in 2019.Its funding was delayed for years as the government fell and an interim government could not approve a new budget. He was told to wait two months for elections. Then it happened again, and again. Successive governments supported the plan: "It's not a political issue; everyone supports it," and none lasted long enough to budget it.Meanwhile, every other government on earth started sprinting. Israel had a head start in 2018-19 and lost it in several areas. A new body now exists under a former military intelligence official, which Ben-Israel welcomes, though he says it still lacks the money.He also has little patience for the argument that Israel should pick its niches because it lacks the land and resources for large data centers. There are many excuses for not starting, he said, and that is one of them. Choosing priorities is fine and necessary, but it requires a program."I would like to see you starting and running very fast."Follow us on Google