Europol: Crypto Wallets Are the Primary Exposure Point for Quantum Attacks

Odaily reports: Europol released two reports on Wednesday, urging organizations, policymakers, and the cryptocurrency industry to immediately prepare for the threat of quantum computing. Its European Cybercrime Centre noted that cryptocurrency wallet keys are the primary exposure point for quantum attacks, while the hash functions used to secure blockchains currently remain largely quantum-resistant.

The reports state that a sufficiently capable quantum computer could derive private keys from exposed public keys, enabling attackers to transfer assets without authorization. Wallets whose public keys have already been exposed on-chain cannot be protected retroactively; holders need to migrate their assets to new wallets before an attack occurs.

Glassnode estimated in May that 6.04 million BTC, representing 30.2% of the issued supply, have exposed public keys. The reports note that NIST-standardized post-quantum signatures are 10 to 120 times larger than the ECDSA signatures currently used by Bitcoin, and migrating all Bitcoin unspent transaction outputs would require at least 76 cumulative days of downtime.

A second report published by Europol points out that commonly used protocols such as TLS, SSH, and OpenPGP face "harvest now, decrypt later" risks, but there is currently no clear evidence that this approach has been exploited at scale. The report argues that for payments, immediate interception within the brief window before transaction confirmation poses a more direct quantum risk than post-hoc decryption. (Decrypt)