Early Wednesday morning flights across major US Airports and Air routes got disrupted due to sudden outage of Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system of FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), which provides real time airports and air routes actual conditions to the flight crews and pilots for safe flight operations.
As per reports, the latest numbers from flight-tracking site FlightAware show more than 4,000 delays and nearly 700 flight cancellations across the US.
While US President Biden directed DOT/FAA to restore the system quickly and safely, and to determine causes through proper investigations, Tech. Analyst, 5 Jewels Research , suspects FAA’s NOTAM system outage as first Quantum Computing based Cyber Attack.
Commenting on today’s (11th Jan.) flight disruption throughout US due to outage of NOTAM system, Chief Analyst of ‘5Jewels Research’ Mr Sumant Parimal said “While federal agencies are investigation NOTAM system outages which happened today morning, and agencies yet not ruled out any cyberattack on this critical flight operations system, but we are not seeing this outage as an independent and isolated incident particularly from recent media reports in which some researchers have claimed that they have capabilities to break 2048-bit RSA encryption using existing quantum computers. Though this is a matter of in-depth technical investigations, but by co-relating these two recent incidents we suspect that NOTAM system outage could be a World’s first Quantum based cyberattack”.
“Quantum Tech. experts were expecting first Quantum computing based cyberattack to happen few years later, when higher qubit quantum computers get developed with capability to break present day used RSA encryptions. But recent claim by some researchers saying that they can break RSA encryption using a quantum machine with only 372 qubits, when the given fact is that higher than 372 quibts quantum computer is already available in world today, makes our critical IT systems like NOTAM system vulnerable to Quantum Computing based cyberattacks. Even if investigating agencies rules out this outage as cyberattack, world should treat it as an eye opener and catalyst for implementing Quantum safe encryption in strategic digital assets, given the fact that it is now possible to break encryptions based on classical security protocols like RSA” said Sumant Parimal.
Mr Sumant Parimal further sees a future need of migrating entire flights /airports Communication and IT systems like NOTAM on Quantum Communication, Quantum Computing and Quantum Sensing technologies, such that critical systems get modernized with enhanced safety, security, reliability, performance and speed features of quantum technologies.
