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Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier

1 points| ck2 | 4 days ago |newscientist.com

2 comments

order

Bender|4 days ago

The article sounds like theory to me. Has anyone used a quantum computer to break all the hashes that hashcat [1] can currently attempt to break for real? Has anyone ported hashcat to a quantum computer?

[1] - https://hashcat.net/hashcat/

ck2|4 days ago

they are currently down to just a month to crack RSA?

> "In 2019, Craig Gidney at Google Quantum AI co-authored a paper that reduced these requirements from 170 million to 20 million quantum bits, or qubits."

> "And in 2025, Gidney devised a way to slash that number to less than a million qubits. Now, Paul Webster at Iceberg Quantum in Australia and his colleagues have managed to decrease the number even further to about 100,000 qubits"

> "Given this connectivity, the team estimated that for 98,000 superconducting qubits, like those currently made by IBM and Google, it would take about a month of computing time to break a common form of RSA encryption"

> "Accomplishing the same in a day would require 471,000 qubits"