Breaking encryption

Encryption is a fundamental element of our security and privacy online. Without it you could not shop online using your credit card or have a private conversation.

Encryption is is encoding of your information using computational methods – the more complicated the computations the more secure the encryption is. But as computers have increased in power, older encryption methods have become vulnerable to breaking (in a reasonable time frame) and so have been abandoned in favour of ones resistant to current computing ability.

Then there are quantum computers on the horizon that threaten to be able to break any encryption method in a reasonable time frame – a reasonable time frame is quick enough to steal your money. Chinese researchers have published a paper showing how this could be done but as of yet have not done it:

Breaking RSA with a Quantum Computer – Schneier on Security

Bruce is sceptical as are others:

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring (scottaaronson.blog)

Bill Buchanan, of Edinburgh Napier University, (I know Bill, he delivered one of the modules on the MSc I took), says the theory is fine but it does not mean it can be implemented on today’s quantum computers:

Prof B Buchanan OBE on Twitter: “You might not agree with the findings of the new PQC cracking paper on RSA, but lattice cryptography is a thing and is likely to replace our existing public key methods.”

Encryption looks safe for a while.

Further Reading

Here is the original paper:

Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor