[Cryptography] The race to Quantum machines.

Tom Mitchell mitch at niftyegg.com
Mon May 27 10:45:56 EDT 2019


On Sun, May 26, 2019 at 3:08 AM Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:

> Tom Mitchell <mitch at niftyegg.com>​ writes:
>
> >IBM believes that commercial quantum machines will be here in about 3-5
> >years.   If encrypted data at rest today has value or is a liability in
> the
> >next 3-5 years quantum resistant keys seem important.
>
> Uhh, you need to read the rest of the article, which you've actually
> quoted:
>
>   "Starting its R&D on quantum computing as early as in 1996, IBM released
> a
>   5-qubit quantum computer in 2016 and unveiled the world's first 20-qubit
>   system, dubbed IBM Q System One, at CES 2019, Morimoto said, disclosing
> that
>   the company will soon launch 58-qubit quantum computers."
>
> From that we have at least a few data points, and there's more from non-IBM
> sources, so we can extrapolate over time.  Technically we can't actually do
> that because from everything I've read it's nonlinear, the first steps are
> relatively easy and then it gets harder and harder [0], but let's say it's
> linear just for argument's sake.  Anyway, to break 1kbit RSA you need
> about a
> million qubits.  Soon we'll have a computer with 58 qubits.  Graphing
> things
> and drawing a line to where even 1kbit RSA is at risk is left as an
> exercise
> for the reader.
>
> Peter.


Found this paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09749.pdf

How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits
Craig Gidney1 , ∗ and Martin Eker

Near the end in Conclusions.
<< In, Mosca poses the hypophoric question: “How many physical qubits will
we need to break RSA-2048? [...]

<< Current estimates range from tens of millions to a billion physical
qubits”. The upper bound of “a billion physical qubits” is likely from [9].
Our physical assumptions are more pessimistic than the physical assumptions
used in that paper (see Table II), so our results can be directly compared.
Doing so shows that, in the four years since 2015, the worst case estimate
of how many qubits will be needed to factor 2048 bit RSA integers has
dropped nearly two orders of magnitude; from a billion to twenty million.”>>


> --
Tinny keyboard.. Mobile ... I am
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