Cryptography Apocalypse

Introduction

In the late 1990s the world was consumed by a coming computer problem known as Y2K, which stood for the Year 2000. The difficulty was that most of the world's devices, computers, and programs to that point in time recorded dates using only the last two digits of the year. From a programmatic level, they couldn't tell the difference between 1850, 1950, and 2050.

When 1999 turned into 2000, many of those computers and programs would not have been able to correctly process any calculation involving two-digit dates in the new century. There had been many known failures by programs and devices that were already using dates in the future (such as scheduling and warranty programs). Symptoms of failed devices and programs ranged from visible errors to errors that happened but were not readily visible (which can be extremely dangerous) to complete device and program shutdowns.

The problem was that although we knew that a sizable percentage of devices and programs were impacted, no one knew which untested things were fine and didn't need to be updated and which had to be updated or replaced before January 1, 2000. There was a two- to three-year rush to find out what was broken and what was fine. As with many slow-moving potential catastrophes, most of the world did little to nothing to prepare until the last few months. The last-minute global rush created a bit of a worldwide panic about what would happen as clocks moved into the new century. There was even a fantastically ...