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Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

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Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#81

Post by jjmarr »

andrewla wrote: post #61
bilsbie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why bitcoin wouldn’t update its software in such a case. The majority of minors just need to agree. But why wouldn’t they if the alternative is going to zero?

How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund. No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes…

> this would be a herculean effort for everyone involved and would require all holders (not miners) to actively update their wallets. Basically infeasible.

Any rational economic actor would participate in a post-quantum hard fork because the alternative is losing all their money.

If this was a company with a $2 trillion market cap there'd be no question they'd move heaven-and-earth to prevent the stock from going to zero.

Y2K only cost $500 billion[1] adjusted for inflation and that required updating essentially every computer on Earth.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Cost

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#82

Post by nashashmi »

auxiliarymoose wrote: post #80
nashashmi wrote: post #10

Before the mega monopolies took over, corps used to partner with universities to conduct this kind of research. Now we have bloated salaries, rich corporations, and expensive research while having under experienced graduates. These costs will get forwarded to the consumer. The future won’t have a lot of things that we have come to expect.

From the article: > in partnership with The University of California, Berkeley, we ran the Quantum Echoes algorithm on our Willow chip... And the author affiliations in the Nature paper include: Princeton University; UC Berkeley; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Caltech; Harvard; UC Santa Barbara; University of Connecticut; UC Santa Barbara; MIT; UC Riverside; Dartmouth College; Max Planck Institute. This is ver…

Thanks. I could not find any mention of it. This is good.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#83

Post by orblivion »

andrewla wrote: post #61
bilsbie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why bitcoin wouldn’t update its software in such a case. The majority of minors just need to agree. But why wouldn’t they if the alternative is going to zero?

How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund. No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes…

Firstly I'd want to see them hash the whole blockchain (not just the last block) with the post-quantum algo to make sure history is intact.

But as far as moving balances - it's up to the owners. It would start with anybody holding a balance high enough to make it worth the amount of money it would take to crack a single key. That cracking price will go down, and the value of BTC may go up. People can move over time as they see fit.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#84

Post by jwpapi »

iwontberude wrote: post #78
andrewla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund. No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes…

As you alluded to, network can have two parallel chains where wallets can be upgraded by users asynchronously before PQC is “needed” (a long way away still) which will leave some wallets vulnerable and others safe. It’s not that herculean as most wallets (not most BTC) are in exchanges. The whales will be sufficiently motivated to switch and everyone else it will happen in the background. A nice benefit is it solves…

Not even needed you can just copy network state of a specific moment in time and encrypt with a new algorithm that will be used from then on

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#85

Post by cyberpunk »

conradev wrote: post #73
cyberpunk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand the threat to banking. Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server. You can’t just inject transactions or something. Is the threat that internal network traffic could be read? Transactions all go to clearing houses anyway. Is it to protect browser->webapp style banking? those all use ec by now anyway, and even if they…

The big threat is passively breaking TLS, so it’s browser traffic. Or, any internet traffic?

Okay, but breaking that TLS (device->bank) would allow you to intercept the session keys and then decrypt the conversation. Alright, so now you can read I logged in and booked a transaction to my landlord or whatever. What else can you do? OTP/2FA code prevents you from re-using my credentials. Has it been demonstrated at all that someone who intercepts a session key is able to somehow inject into a conversation? It seems highly unlikely to me with TCP over the internet.

So we are all in a collective flap that someone can see my bank transactions? These are pretty much public knowledge to governments/central banks/clearing houses anyway -- doesn't seem like all that big a deal to me.

(I work on payment processing systems for a large bank)

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#86

Post by bawolff »

cyberpunk wrote: post #59
deliriumchn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, not really, PQC is already being discussed in pretty much every relevant crypto thing for couple years alearady and there are multiple PQC algos ready to protect important data in banking etc as well

I don’t really understand the threat to banking. Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server. You can’t just inject transactions or something. Is the threat that internal network traffic could be read? Transactions all go to clearing houses anyway. Is it to protect browser->webapp style banking? those all use ec by now anyway, and even if they…

> those all use ec by now anyway

As far as i am aware, eliptic curve is also vulnerable to quantum attacks.

The threat is generally both passive eavesdropping to decrypt later and also active MITM attacks. Both of course require the attacker to be in a position to eavesdrop.

> Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server.

Well if you are sitting in the right place on the network then you can.

> how do you mitm this traffic?

Depends on the scenario. If you are government or ISP then its easy. Otherwise it might be difficult. Typical real life scenarios are when the victim is using wifi and the attacker is in the physical vicinity.

Like all things crypto, it always depends on context. What information are you trying to protect and who are you trying to protect.

All that said, people are already experimenting with PQC so it might mostly be moot by the time a quantum computer comes around. On the other hand people are still using md5 so legacy will bite.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#87

Post by thedrexster »

getnormality wrote: post #36
Imnimo wrote: post #9

As with any quantum computing news, I will wait for Scott Aaronson to tell me what to think about this.

I will wait for a HN commenter to tell me what Scott Aaronson thinks about this.

this is my approach, as well, lol

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#88

Post by refulgentis »

TeeMassive wrote: post #72

The last time I heard a similar news from Google, it turned out they were solving a quantum phenomenon using a quantum phenomenon. It seems to be the same pattern here. Not to say it's not progress, but kind of feels like overhyped.

Idk. I get this is the median take across many comments, I don’t mean to be disagreeable with a crowd. But I don’t know why using quantum phenomena is a sign something’s off. It’s a quantum computer! But I know something is off with this take if it didn’t strike you that way.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#89

Post by auxiliarymoose »

einsteinx2 wrote: post #3

> demonstrates the first-ever algorithm to achieve verifiable quantum advantage on hardware. Am I crazy or have I heard this same announcement from Google and others like 5 times at this point?

My understanding is that this one is "verifiable" which means you get a reproducible result (i.e. consistent result comes out of a computation that would take much longer to do classically).

Non-verifiable computations include things like pulling from a hard-to-compute probability distribution (i.e. random number generator) where it is faster, but the result is inherently not the same each time.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#90

Post by [deleted] »

orblivion wrote: post #83
andrewla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund. No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes…

Firstly I'd want to see them hash the whole blockchain (not just the last block) with the post-quantum algo to make sure history is intact. But as far as moving balances - it's up to the owners. It would start with anybody holding a balance high enough to make it worth the amount of money it would take to crack a single key. That cracking price will go down, and the value of BTC may go up. People can move over time a…

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