Qubits Needed to Crack Encryption Fall 200-Fold in Under a Year
Researchers say neutral-atom designs and new error-correction methods cut the qubit estimate from millions to about 10,000.
- On Tuesday, Caltech and Oratomic researchers proposed that a quantum computer with 10,000 to 20,000 qubits could solve encryption algorithms, drastically reducing prior million-qubit estimates.
- Led by Manuel Endres, professor of physics at Caltech, the team utilized neutral-atom quantum systems with optical tweezers to move and entangle atoms, encoding logical qubits with as few as five physical qubits.
- The study suggests a system with 26,000 qubits could break ECC-256 encryption in 10 days, while parallelized architectures with 102,000 qubits would crack RSA-2048 encryption in 97 days.
- These findings accelerate quantum encryption threats to the end of the decade, whereas scientists previously estimated such powerful machines would require another 10 or 20 years to build.
- While results are theoretical, scientists emphasize that significant engineering challenges remain to build scalable, fault-tolerant systems, leaving the transition to functional quantum computers not yet guaranteed.
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The rapid development of quantum technology has also brought closer the possibility of cracking the encryption algorithms that currently secure internet traffic. A recent study suggests that many such algorithms could be cracked in a reasonable amount of time using a computer with around 10,000 quantum bits.
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Quantum computers need vastly fewer resources than thought to break vital encryption
Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have concluded. In one, researchers demonstrated the use of neutral atoms as reconfigurable qubits that have free access to each other. They went on to show this approach could allow a quantum computer to break 256-bit elliptic c…
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