this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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The problem is that to start breaking encryption you need quantum computing with a bunch of qubits as originally defined and not "our lawyer signed off on the claim that we have 1000 qubits".
"Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog"
holy shit how have i never heard of this paper
thank you for sharing!
it's really recent. I think I saw it like 2 weeks ago? via the IACR toot feed iirc
oh yeah that paper was also fantastic :D
Not only that, the reported development of post-quantum cryptography (with NIST having released some finalised encryption standards last year) could give cybersec professionals a headstart on protecting everything if it fully comes to fruition (assuming said cryptography lives up to its billing).
You want me to take a shot in the dark, I expect zero-knowledge proofs will manage to break into the mainstream before quantum computing becomes a thing - minimising the info you give out is good for protecting your users' privacy, and minimises the amount of info would-be attackers could work with.
"reported development" wat
I'm not sure I fully understand your comment here (it almost seems as though you're posting this as a "very recent" thing)? which is confusing because the body of work and implementations go back years. the current works around standardisation and such (as well as extending in specific protocols) is all around setting baselines
also, following on re diz's comment, to my knowledge the most recently fanfare'd quantum attack on an rsa-family algo was a whole whopping 22 bit integer. keep in mind that for this field, difficulty scales exponentially with every bit. and 2048/4096 rsa usage has been commonplace for a fair while even before ecdsa/ed25519/chacha/poly/etc all started picking up in popularity (which is also like 2014+). I have no good insights on the qubits development world to guess how far off we are (perhaps blake might have a guess here), but it feels a significant way off