The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.” No, it’s not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken wildly out of proportion. Cryptography is safe, and will be for a long time EDITED TO ADD (11/3): Really good explainer from Dan Goodin.
I thought it was already fairly well established that symmetric encryption is not something that a quantum computer could potentially crack, only asymmetric encryption is theoretically possible due to its use of a prime order field.
Moreover:
Even if we go with the assumption that the military is 10 years ahead in technology and can factor 221 with Shor’s, that’s still nowhere near enough to break RSA. Much more efficient to attack all the systemic flaws in RSA, hence why 1024 is no longer considered secure, 2048 is assumed to be breakable by any 3 letter agency, 4096 is assumed to be safe (for now), but mostly the latest and greatest is elliptical ECDSA/Ed25519 (of which NIST has been accused of rigging ECDSA for easier cracking lol).
Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover’s algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it’d technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.