With Google’s release of its Pixel 9 pro and Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro now just around the corner, all eyes on Samsung to see what’s coming next. And while speculation builds as to what the Galaxy S25 Ultra might bring, Samsung has just launched a new device that breaks new ground in securing Galaxy phones. There is a catch, though, and it’s a big one. Almost no-one reading this can buy the device—not unless you live in Korea. But at least you can see what you’re missing.
As SamMobile explains, Samsung’s Quantum5 “an extra-secure version of the Galaxy A55 in South Korea” includes a uber-secure chip from Switzerland’s ID Quantique (IDQ), whose Quantum Key Distribution “ensures ensure long-term protection of sensitive data into and beyond the quantum era when quantum computers will render most of today’s conventional encryption algorithms vulnerable.”
The phone has been developed and released in conjunction with SK Telecom, thus the geographic restrictions. The “quantum safe” chip has been designed to protect secure information such as biometrics and credentials, but can also better protect online banking and other especially vulnerable processes. “It combines its truly random number generation process with Samsung Knox for improved security.”
As IDQ explains, “today’s digital activities – from mobile banking, personal health data recording and online purchases to professional applications and multifactor authentication – have turned mobile phones into a goldmine of financial, health, business and personal information, raising the need for security to the edge.”
Let’s not get these various themes mixed up. This is not the same as the genuine post-quantum cryptography we’re seeing announced elsewhere. But it’s a powerful advance, deploying a Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) chipset to supplement the same Galaxy AI hardware now deploying across other devices.
This is the fifth generation of (Korea-only) Galaxy phones with an IDQ chip onboard, and means that “by generating unpredictable true random numbers, IDQ’s QRNG chip protects the process from log-in / authentication / payment / unlock / OTP generation of service apps ranging from financial apps to social media apps and games offering powerful trust to the users.”
The added layer of protection is important, but the extreme reality of real quantum cryptography is to protect against future risks. The risk being that today’s encrypted data can be captured and stored until quantum computers have evolved to break those encryption protocols and decrypt that data. For sensitive mails, messages and files this has huge implications, for real-time transactions it’s less critical.
Just three weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its initial standards for encryption that can “withstand cyberattacks from a quantum computer.” NIST says that “researchers around the world are racing to build quantum computers that would operate in radically different ways from ordinary computers and could break the current encryption that provides security and privacy for just about everything we do online.”
This push to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), says uber-secure messenger Signal, means that while “systems known to exist today do not yet have enough qubits to pose a threat to the public-key cryptography that Signal currently uses, if a sufficiently powerful quantum computer were built in the future, it could be used to compute a private key from a public key thereby breaking encrypted messages.” Apple anounced its own PQC future-proofing for iMessage earlier this year.
Do you need a truly “quantum safe” phone—no. Your phone won’t long enough to see quantum computers cracking today’s crypto, and the data you create can be protected by the services and storage you use. You need to stick to usual phone safeguards to keep safe from most threats, and this device does advance today’s technology. But quantum sounds cool, which means this touches upon a “a next big thing” feature, offering some first-to-market innovation. If you do like to be a first adopter, the challenge will be geography, of course, limiting this to just a lucky few.
You can expect to hear much more about PQC itself over the coming months as it becomes the latest benchmark by which solutions and services are judged. Samsung is ahead of the curve from a device perspective touching on some of these lower level themes, As such, it seems a safe bet this offering will be expanded to other devices and the millions of users who for now will just have to watch and wait.
