We live in a world where almost every digital asset is protected by some type of encryption, ranging from private email accounts to subscription services to online bank and stock trading accounts to critical infrastructure systems such as the national electrical grid and municipal water systems. Error mitigation will provide a partial solution, but not enough to scale quantum machines to the level needed to run a robust version of Shor's algorithm that can break RSA encryption and reveal its public and private keys. Even though a great deal of progress in quantum computing has been made since then, fault tolerance remains a significant technical challenge that may require another five or more years before it is achieved. These estimates were made several years ago. Michele Mosca from the University of Waterloo, estimates that there is a 1-in-7 chance that some of the fundamental public-key cryptography tools will be broken by 2026, and a 50% chance by 2031. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a report several years ago, the Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography, that estimates the first cryptographic breaches could come as soon as 2030.There have been predictions about when encryption-hacking might occur by a few expert sources: The capability will evolve along a sequential timeline of well-defined improvements in quantum computing power.īesides the scale and fault-tolerance mentioned above, the cryptography-defeating quantum machine of the future will also likely employ a quantum-centric supercomputer architecture. That said, whenever it does happen, it won't be a surprise. When will it be possible to break encryption?īut how long is “eventually”? There is no way to say precisely when quantum computers will be able to break current cryptographic algorithms. This year, IBM's quantum roadmap calls for the release of its largest gate-based quantum computer processors to date, one that uses 1,100 qubits.ĭespite the limited size of our present-day quantum computers, most experts have little doubt that the technology will eventually develop the power needed to break RSA encryption within an actionable amount of time. Let’s put those millions of qubits in perspective. It wouldn't be a fast process-it would take 104 days-but it would be feasible. Fujitsu researchers estimated that a fault-tolerant quantum computer equipped with 10,000 logical qubits (a logical qubit contains multiple physical qubits) and 2.23 trillion quantum gates could also crack RSA. RSA could also be broken with fewer qubits, but it would take longer. One study theorized that someone would need a 20-million-qubit fault-tolerant quantum computer to break RSA-2,048 encryption in 8 hours. While classical supercomputers pose no risk to current cryptography and encryption, quantum computers will have no problem penetrating existing cryptography schemes. However, the same feat will be possible with an advanced quantum computer within a few hours to a few days -and therein lies the problem. A long time, yes, but the number of possible combinations of prime numbers that could be used to create such a key is so vast that it would be impossible to test them in less than a few million years. It is generally accepted by scientists that a classical supercomputer would require millions of years to crack a 2,048-bit RSA key. How much quantum computing power is needed to break encryption? The public key can be shared with everyone, while the private key is kept secret. The public key is used to encrypt data, while the private key is used to decrypt it. It is susceptible to being hacked using the Shor algorithm because it uses two large prime numbers that are multiplied together to create a public key and a private key. RSA encryption is one of the most common forms of asymmetric cryptography.
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