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Title: How Many Qubits Will It Take to Break Secure Public Key Cryptography
Algorithms?

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/24/053023...

Wednesday Google security researchers published a preprint demonstrating that
2048-bit RSA encryption "could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer
with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week," writes Google's security
blog. "This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous
estimate, published in 2019... " The reduction in physical qubit count comes
from two sources: better algorithms and better error correction - whereby
qubits used by the algorithm ("logical qubits" are redundantly encoded
across many physical qubits, so that errors can be detected and corrected...
[Google's researchers found a way to reduce the operations in a 2024
algorithm from 1000x more than previous work to just 2x. And "On the error
correction side, the key change is tripling the storage density of idle
logical qubits by adding a second layer of error correction."] Notably,
quantum computers with relevant error rates currently have on the order of
only 100 to 1000 qubits, and the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) recently released standard PQC algorithms that are expected
to be resistant to future large-scale quantum computers. However, this new
result does underscore the importance of migrating to these standards in line
with NIST recommended timelines. The article notes that Google started using
the standardized version of ML-KEM once it became available, both internally
and for encrypting traffic in Chrome... "The initial public draft of the NIST
internal report on the transition to post-quantum cryptography standards
states that vulnerable systems should be deprecated after 2030 and disallowed
after 2035. Our work highlights the importance of adhering to this
recommended timeline."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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