[Cryptography] cryptography Digest, Vol 13, Issue 6

[Bill Cox]

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Sanjeet Suhag <suhagsanjeet at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello all.
>
> I’m a 17 year old high school student currently studying for my last year
> in high school. I’m a student of the IB diploma and I have to do an
> extended essay, which is essentially a research paper on a topic related to
> any subject. As a programmer, I wanted to do something related to Computer
> Science. I have my fair share of technical knowledge of cryptography and it
> is clearly one of my favourite topics to do a research paper on. Since
> almost everything else has already been done in standard cryptography, I
> believe that a confluence of Quantum Computing and its affect on the
> current cryptographic standards would be useful. So, as most people out
> here have much more knowledge than me on topics like this, could you please
> suggest whether or not this is a feasible topic of investigation, or if
> not, is there anything else that I can do (i.e. some other technical aspect
> of Cryptography) ?
>
> Sanjeet
>

Nice topic.  I'm not very knowledgable about this, but Dwave may have the
best quantum factoring capability, with a 512 cubit machine now, and a
machine with at least twice that in the works.  There was a teaser about a
future blog post from their CTO titled, "Better than Shor", and then
everything about using Dwave for factoring integers somehow seems to have
been scrubbed from the Internet.  However, there is ongoing research into
the problem, such as:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/01/adiabatic-quantum-computers-have.html

If I understand correctly, with a small constant factor of qubits larger
than the number of bits of N, a Dwave machine should be able to factor N,
given low enough noise and accurate enough control (big if).  So, there is
a reasonable possibility that quantum annealers may be built in the next
decade or so that could crack most current public key cryptosystems.
 There's a lot on post-quantum cryptography out there.

Bill
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