Design of a silicon quantum computer chip

Re:Design of a silicon quantum computer chip by 3chelon on Monday December 18, 2017 @02:42PM (#15954748)

About the only ting i know about quantum computing is it will make current encryption techniques redundant. Is anyone thinking seriously about what that will mean for global e-commerce? There will be a point in time when these machines are not affordable on the mass market, but affordable by governments. At that point, presumably, we are all going to be pwned?

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Re:Design of a silicon quantum computer chip by sebular on Monday December 18, 2017 @03:00PM (#15954913)

I think you mean "obsolete" and not "redundant" but yes, the common asymmetric encryption methods used for things like HTTPS are trivially cracked with a powerful enough quantum computer.

The good news is that people have been anticipating this for a while, and there's a lot of study in the field of post-quantum encryption. From what I understand, people have come up with techniques that work (meaning nobody's discovered a reason why they wouldn't work).

The bad news is that this does nothing for the data that we're currently encrypting. There's nothing to stop someone from storing today's encrypted web traffic and decoding it in the future when working quantum computers are capable.

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, we know that the US government is already hoarding and sifting through data, so I have no doubt that there are plenty of agencies planning on doing this exact thing.

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Re:Design of a silicon quantum computer chip by pcl on Monday December 18, 2017 @02:49PM (#15954817)

Here's a good starting point to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Also, there's some related discussion in the amazing cinematographic masterpiece that is Sneakers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

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Re:Design of a silicon quantum computer chip by volkk on Monday December 18, 2017 @02:49PM (#15954815)

not all encryption techniques-- off the top of my head, only RSA (algos that depend on prime number factorization)

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