Will it break crypto security within a few years?
Digital Security, We Live Progress, Privacy
Current cryptographic security methods watch out – quantum computing is coming for your lunch.
27 Jul 2023
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3 min. read
If the rapid pace at which groups like Google are spooling up amped-up quantum computers continues, so too drops the shot clock to fix or replace cryptographic algorithms used to secure just about everything before they become quite crackable. The reason: The fundamental structure of computing – the bit – gets revamped to contain massive amounts of data each in a thing called qubit (short for ‘quantum bit’). After claiming quantum supremacy back in 2019, Google Quantum AI has now built the second generation of a computer that can digest and process an insane amount of them in record time, allowing them to hammer away at authentication until it breaks.
And this is just the beginning.
Quantum computing is a famously quirky – but promising – technology, highly susceptible to tricky noise problems that have bedeviled the tech, which tend to cause them to go berserk. But get them quiet enough to be maximally useable, and you fundamentally change computing power, by orders of magnitude.
To do that, a new system of minimizing noise and still getting usable information processed utilizes a scheme called random circuit sampling (RCS), which allows 70-qubit processing, vs. the last generation’s 53-qubit on the Sycamore quantum processor. That’s a HUGE difference in processing power. There are substantial efforts to push toward even higher qubit processing if the tech can either make quantum less noisy, optimize its performance amidst increased noise, or, most likely, both.
Even with the current level of computing power, however, the team estimates, “we conclude that our demonstration is firmly in the regime of beyond-classical quantum computation.” Basically, that means whatever supercomputers the world is using now will rapidly become dinosaurs, somewhat akin to condensing the computing power of yesterday’s mainframe into a smartphone you probably have sitting in your pocket. And it’s not just the scale of the…
