According to reports circulating on the web, 24 Chinese researchers have reportedly successfully broken the RSA cipher using quantum computers. This would be an important achievement since it is widely used in security practice today. However, many experts, computer scientists, and cryptographers do not believe that the researchers have made a significant discovery based on the scientific paper published in December 2022.
In September 2022, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) warned that the post-quantum world will soon arrive, and modern encryption technology could be breached, he stressed. A few months later, in December 2022, 24 Chinese researchers published ascientific paperclaiming to have broken the 2048-bit RSA cipher using a quantum computer. The paper follows an April 2022reportdetailing that China is “leading” in the quantum computer race.
Basically, a quantum computer is a type of computing device that uses quantum mechanical phenomena to perform operations on data faster than a classical computer can perform computational tasks. RSA (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman), named after its developers, is widely used in current computer systems. It is an example of a public key cryptosystem, which is often used in modern computers to encrypt and decrypt messages.
On January 5, 2023, the Financial Times (FT)reportedon a paper claiming that Chinese researchers had successfully cracked the RSA cipher; the FT asked several experts about the paperand one of them, Roger Grimes, a computer security expert and author, told the FT: “This is a big claim. ‘This is a big claim. It would mean that governments can decrypt other governments’ secrets. If it’s true – which is a big if – it will be the kind of secret you see in the movies, and it’s one of the biggest things ever in computer science.”
A Google Groups conversationalso discussed whether Chinese researchers have factored in 2048-bit integers Bruce Schneier, acomputer security and cryptography expert, published aanalysiswhich relied on adisputed paperwritten by German mathematician Peter Schnorr Schnorr. Schneier also gave his opinion on the so-called quantum computing breakthroughs to the Financial Times. Schneier told the FT that “there is no empirical evidence that the (new) quantum algorithms overcome the Schnorr scaling problem.” We have no reason to believe that it won’t, but we also have no reason to believe that it will.”
Crypto advocates have been worried for some time because quantum computers have the potential to break modern encryption techniques. However, some bi