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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's how it's been explained to me by laymen many many times. Just casually (ish, I have a math degree) looking at the math, chatting with a friend who is a quantum physicist, being involved with computers, etc I find that Grover's Algorithm is not at all capable of something like that. I'm not sure there's anything better in terms of breaking encryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

Grover's algorithm could brute-force a 128-bit symmetric cryptographic key in roughly 264 iterations, or a 256-bit key in roughly 2128 iterations. It may not be the case that Grover's algorithm poses a significantly increased risk to encryption over existing classical algorithms, however.[4]

I am stoked for what it could do for protein folding, or other heavy simulation work, but in terms of proper encryption I don't believe it actually will change much.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The typical example is Shor's algorithm

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

    It allows to efficiently find the prime factors of an integer - a problem without a known polynomial algorithm on a classical computer.

    This would directly break RSA encryption, as it relies on factorisation being difficult.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_cryptosystem

    However, there are encryption algorithms that are considered safe even against a quantum computer.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Also the largest number ever factorized on a quantum computer (not simulated) is like 30. So this is like 1950's level of computing(in terms of number of transistors vs qbits) and we're 20-30 years of incremental change away from really threatening encryption

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