Live data from Hacker News

Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

newscientist.com

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#11
post #5
post #4

So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?

Not exactly. D-Wave quantum computers (like the one in the article) use "adiabatic quantum computing", which is more limited than normal quantum computing (it can't run every quantum algorithm). We're still a little ways off from breaking RSA.

D-Wave does have a factoring algorithm.

See the comments from D-Wave here: http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/learning-to-program-th...

"We do have a factoring algorithm that I’m going to do a series of blog posts on"

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#12
post #7
post #4

So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?

Well, actually not all our encryption methods: there are asymmetric encryption algorithms that provide strong encryption even in the face of quantum computers. Unfortunately, the whole world is using RSA which is vulnerable. I don't know that much about quantum computing, but I believe it may be possible that D-Wave has managed to figure out how to build a useful quantum computer that is nevertheless not general-purp…

When the FBI stops asking for backdoors in Internet services, we'll know they probably don't need them anymore. Then take into account that NSA is already probably 5-10 years ahead of them for any sort of surveillance technology.

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#13
post #4

So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?

Yes, because they are all based on the assumption how much time it takes to break them with brute force attacks using the current architectures.

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#14
post #4

So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?

Bitcoin addresses are hashes, not the public keys themselves. Thus they are safe against a quantum factoring algorithm. If you spend money from a bitcoin address though, the public key does get written to the block chain but to combat this you merely have to send your change to a new address and you'll be safe again.

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#15

wouldn't it be more fair to compare to an FPGA solution for those problem sets?

Sure but that's not the point here. The important thing is that this quantum computer actually WORKS. In 2 years classical computers will be maybe 5 times faster. But this quantum computer will be 1000s of times faster (at these specific problems) so very soon any comparison will be irrelevant.

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#16
post #4

So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?

Pretty much: Quantum Computers (QCs) can factor numbers (Shor's algorithm) and calculate discrete logarithms in polynomial time. I don't know whether there's an algorithm for hash-calculation that will let someone dominate the BitCoin hashing chain with a QC though.

On the other hand, no one actually knows whether it's possible to build a quantum computer with enough q-bits that will stay coherent for long enough to carry out the calculation: as you add q-bits, noise becomes more and more of a problem. You can add error correction, but that makes keeping all the q-bits coherent harder because now you've got even more of them! At the moment, no-one knows (unless the NSA has built one and isn't telling!) which effect is going to win out as the number of q-bits increases.

(You can't use a smaller QC to simulate a slower version of a larger one, unlike in the non-quantum computing world: if you need to factor a 1024 bit number and you only have a 1000 bit QC you can't do it, as I understand things.)

Note that Quantum Computers don't help as much with symmetric encryption, unless someone comes up with a much better algorithm. They let you effectively halve the key-space, which is a fairly big deal, but you can get back to the same level of difficulty by doubling up the size of your keyspace: a 256-bit AES key provides roughly the protection of a 128-bit key in a quantum computing world. This is different to public-key encryption, where you can double the key size, but if your opponent has a quantum computer with enough q-bits, they can still break your new key in reasonable time.

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#18
post #8

Related: When I first heard about quantum computers I thought a bit would be a value of 0 to 1 (or 0V to 5V or something like that). I still am very curious if such a computer could exist and would be useful. For example to do very quick raytracing. Although inaccurate (I assume) it could still be very useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

Re: Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust

#19
post #4

So, basically, as soon a someone builds one of those optimised for factoring primes, all our encryption methods are finished, as is the Bitcoin economy, right? Assuming the contents of the article are true (which is possible), how long before that happens? A few years? A decade?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
Post reply on HN