Could be related to the Russian announcement, a few weeks ago, that they have built a 30 qubit computer (which may or may not be reasonably true – in the field, everybody has a different definition of "qubit", "computer" and even "have").
Yeah, I suspect. As the article notes, it might be related to quantum simulation limits (e.g., QISKIT can't IIRC simulate more than 32 qubits), or taken from the literature on using Grover's alg to attack S-AES, but it feels pretty arbitrary to me (though I haven't been current on quantum computing for several years now).
Whats mysterious? When I led a team working on some government funded encryption stuff a few years ago, everyone in gov was terrified of post-quantum cryptography. 10x a day I had to answer questions about PQKD.
Maybe some very well funded quantum projects have made certain implementations broken- but it never really mattered, because why have PQKD when you have XKCD. lol
Id still employ social engineering, deepfakes, and violence over the cost of building a machine.
By the way, we all know the Cloudflare lava lamps? I built a laser diode/beam splitter random number generator at home, fun toy.
I've seen a recent paper that claims that they have successfully executed one (single) instance of Grover's algorithm using existing commercial quantum hardware, with lots of hypotheses and lots of manual intervention.
We'll get there, but I don't think that anybody has reasonably/reproducibly broken RSA using a quantum computer just yet.
When you think of the significance of being able to break encryption like this, it stands to reason that tech that achieves these capabilities would be born secret.
Quantum computing is based on a series of scientific breakthroughs and still needs quite a few scientific and technological breakthroughs in several domains before it becomes viable for cryptography (in other fields, we're much closer), in addition to lots of custom hardware.
It's extremely rare (and unpredictable) for a scientist to achieve any kind of breakthrough entirely on their own. They need to exchange ideas with other scientists from all over the world. So you pretty much need your scientists are to do their research largely in public – it _might_ be possible to emulate this if you have a large enough number of scientists on some kind of secret campus, but you'll need to make sure that you're hiring top scientists and you're hurting their ability to both learn and teach the future top scientists you're also going to need and their disappearance from the public track will attract lots of attention.
Add to this the custom hardware, which will quite often come from another country, and it's really hard to keep the big things secret.
Hmmm.... I wonder if someone has finally cracked RSA or its friends.
I also remember a conspiracy theory that Bitcoin was actually made as a litmus test to know if\when someone somewhere achieves quantum supremacy (because then they would be able to crack the block....or something like that
Best estimate I know of for cracking an interesting RSA (2048 bit) is 8 hr and 20,000,000 superconducting (physical) qubits with error rates ~ 0.1% [1].
The NSA and their ilk would not have waited for AES to be broken. They would move to ban these things in response to theoretical albeit confident assessment of the risk.
Aren’t these export controls rather than import controls? That is, if a company in their bloc does succeed at developing cryptographically-relevant quantum computers, they’d just as soon that company not sell that tech on to the adversary?
As you said, they’ve loudly assumed it’s possible—so wouldn’t it make sense for them to draw a line in the sand now, before the horse has bolted, to indicate where the “now it’s a national security matter” threshold lies?
Could be related to the Russian announcement, a few weeks ago, that they have built a 30 qubit computer (which may or may not be reasonably true – in the field, everybody has a different definition of "qubit", "computer" and even "have").
There's no mystery here. One country came up with some arbitrary criteria, and the other countries copied them.
Yeah, I suspect. As the article notes, it might be related to quantum simulation limits (e.g., QISKIT can't IIRC simulate more than 32 qubits), or taken from the literature on using Grover's alg to attack S-AES, but it feels pretty arbitrary to me (though I haven't been current on quantum computing for several years now).
Whats mysterious? When I led a team working on some government funded encryption stuff a few years ago, everyone in gov was terrified of post-quantum cryptography. 10x a day I had to answer questions about PQKD.
Maybe some very well funded quantum projects have made certain implementations broken- but it never really mattered, because why have PQKD when you have XKCD. lol
Id still employ social engineering, deepfakes, and violence over the cost of building a machine.
By the way, we all know the Cloudflare lava lamps? I built a laser diode/beam splitter random number generator at home, fun toy.
I've seen a recent paper that claims that they have successfully executed one (single) instance of Grover's algorithm using existing commercial quantum hardware, with lots of hypotheses and lots of manual intervention.
We'll get there, but I don't think that anybody has reasonably/reproducibly broken RSA using a quantum computer just yet.
When you think of the significance of being able to break encryption like this, it stands to reason that tech that achieves these capabilities would be born secret.
I'm not sure.
Quantum computing is based on a series of scientific breakthroughs and still needs quite a few scientific and technological breakthroughs in several domains before it becomes viable for cryptography (in other fields, we're much closer), in addition to lots of custom hardware.
It's extremely rare (and unpredictable) for a scientist to achieve any kind of breakthrough entirely on their own. They need to exchange ideas with other scientists from all over the world. So you pretty much need your scientists are to do their research largely in public – it _might_ be possible to emulate this if you have a large enough number of scientists on some kind of secret campus, but you'll need to make sure that you're hiring top scientists and you're hurting their ability to both learn and teach the future top scientists you're also going to need and their disappearance from the public track will attract lots of attention.
Add to this the custom hardware, which will quite often come from another country, and it's really hard to keep the big things secret.
The military is pretty good at coordinating complex engineering projects in secret.
Secrets are near impossible to keep beyond 1 person.
Sure, plus at that point they don't have utility. But still, the government has a track record of secret keeping and silencing entire organizations.
[dead]
Discussions
(15 points, 2 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40865218
(20 points, 17 hours ago, 8 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40879417
Hmmm.... I wonder if someone has finally cracked RSA or its friends.
I also remember a conspiracy theory that Bitcoin was actually made as a litmus test to know if\when someone somewhere achieves quantum supremacy (because then they would be able to crack the block....or something like that
Best estimate I know of for cracking an interesting RSA (2048 bit) is 8 hr and 20,000,000 superconducting (physical) qubits with error rates ~ 0.1% [1].
This seems super premature.
[1] https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
I would put a fairly large wager on it just being bureaucratic dumbassitosity, and give you odds.
The NSA and their ilk would not have waited for AES to be broken. They would move to ban these things in response to theoretical albeit confident assessment of the risk.
Hmm, that doesn't sound right to my ear.
They've loudly assumed it is possible.
c.f. Their focus has been on incentivizing private actors to do post-quantum algorithms, yesterday.
c.f. most recently, https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/advancing-our-amazing-bet-...
Do you have more info on why they'd ban import of it? Seems like an obviously wrong strategy to combat it.
Aren’t these export controls rather than import controls? That is, if a company in their bloc does succeed at developing cryptographically-relevant quantum computers, they’d just as soon that company not sell that tech on to the adversary?
As you said, they’ve loudly assumed it’s possible—so wouldn’t it make sense for them to draw a line in the sand now, before the horse has bolted, to indicate where the “now it’s a national security matter” threshold lies?
there was some crazy around bitcoin and quantum, led by Vitalik Buterin when he was young and foolish https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/