Researchers in China say they used a quantum computer to break RSA encryption. But this does not mean that your emails or WhatsApp messages will be hacked in the near future.
Encryption is used to protect sensitive data, such as banking information and medical records, when transferred over the internet. RSA, named after its creators Ron Rivvest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, is a type of encryption called asymmetric encryption that uses two different but related keys to solve a mathematical problem.
Encryption has proven to be a successful method of protecting confidential information because it requires mathematical calculations so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers in the world cannot decipher them unless they have an encryption key.
Quantum computers have long been predicted to make current encryption technology obsolete. Quantum computers can process large amounts of information in much less time than a traditional computer. This is because they can process calculations in parallel rather than serially, thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics and the qubits that power them. In theory, this means that a quantum computer would need seconds to solve a problem that would take classical computers millions of years.
But quantum computing is an emerging technology, and today’s most powerful quantum machines contain thousands of qubits. And scientists predict we’ll need a machine with millions of qubits to be more powerful than our most powerful classical computers. Quantum computers require expensive and complex infrastructure as well as special laboratories.
But in a study published in May in the Chinese Journal of Computer Science, researchers found that the D-Wave Advantage, a 5,760-qubit machine manufactured by California-based D-Wave Quantum Systems, was able to break the RSA encryption they were tasked to crack.
The machine did this using a process called quantum annealing. Quantum annealing uses quantum fluctuations (irregular changes in energy levels in quantum systems) to optimize a problem to solve it in the simplest way possible.
Although they used quantum computing to decrypt RSA encryption, they only used a 50-bit integer for RSA encryption. Size matters for encryption. The strength of RSA encryption is related to the integer length, which determines how big the problem is. For example, a 50-bit integer has 9.67×10^16 possible values.
However, most modern encryption technologies now use integers between 1024 and 2048 bits. A 1024-bit integer has 1,797×10^308 possible values, while a 2048-bit integer has 3,231×10^616 possible values. As a result, the number of possible values of existing encryption methods is much larger and therefore more complex than researchers have been able to handle.
The research is an interesting proof of concept that supports the expectation that quantum computers will one day be able to crack modern encryption technologies. Although not mentioned in the paper, natural next steps for such research would be to examine how D-Wave Advantage and quantum annealing can handle larger integer encryption patterns, such as 128- or 256-bit integers.
It also signals the emergence of quantum computers that will affect encryption-based security. That’s why scientists are also developing post-quantum cryptography technologies, a type of cryptography that uses algorithms that are resistant to decryption by quantum computers. However, like quantum computers, this technology is still many years away from being fully implemented.
Source: Port Altele
