[Cryptography] Has quantum cryptanalysis actually achieved anything?

[Jon Callas]

Apropos of the discussion, this morning on twitter I saw:

<https://twitter.com/mjos_crypto/status/1893989617575092240>

   Oh lord, they published it <screen shot> [This is the paper on the D-Wave 
   factorization of a 2048-bit RSA number -- jdcc]
   <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=10817698>
   

   If you look at the ten "2048-bit factorizations" in appendix S1, the distance 
   p-q between the factors is either 2 (a prime pair) or 6. You just compute square 
   root of n and guess one bit -- the complexity is literally 2^1.

So there's another slight-of-hand trick. Pick a number with the primes really close to each other. I guess this is a real attack on Rabin, though, right? And that's interesting, as we know Rabin is hard.

I also saw <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.6758> another subset factorization. Note that I said "subset" because I share the outrage at people pumping up the result, while thinking that inside there's something interesting going on. I could rathole into some interesting speculation, I think.

	Jon