It is likely, if not inevitable, that quantum computers will soon be able to break the encryption methods that secure your passwords, your data, and anything else kept under digital lock and key.
That’s because, while classic computers fundamentally operate on 1s and 0s, quantum machines play by different rules. They use “quantum bits,” or qubits, that transcend binaries. They can exist as a 1 or a 0 or something else entirely. That flexibility will likely allow future quantum computers to quickly solve certain types of problems—like cracking cryptographic codes—that traditional computers simply can’t.
How big is the gap? It’s a tough question to answer precisely, because the quantum computers that could pull this off don’t exist yet—at least, as far as anyone knows. But we’ve put together a little demonstration, purely for illustrative purposes, to give a better sense of the orders of magnitude we’re dealing with.
In a 2021 research paper, Google engineer Craig Gidney and his coauthor suggested that it would take eight hours for a quantum computer with 20-million noisy qubits to factor RSA-2048 encryption. We’re years away from a device of that magnitude, but we’ll go with it. (Gidney recently claimed that you could also do it in a week with a more reasonable 1 million noisy qubits.) For our classic computer, our own back-of-the-napkin math suggests that the Frontier supercomputer would take 149 million years to achieve the same result.
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