Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear(blog.google)
blog.google
Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cryptography-migration-timeline/
9 comments
Q-day estimates are sensitive to several factors; e.g., hardware qubit counts, error correction overhead, and algorithmic efficiency (e.g., better factoring approaches could compress the timeline meaningfully without any hardware breakthrough).
Migration complexity side is also not straightforward. Cryptographic primitives tend to be deeply embedded in ways that are not always easy to find. FWIW, we built a free scanning tool for developers to find and remediate cryptographic vulnerabilities in their repos (still in beta: https://app.threatpoint.com).
2029 might be conservative or optimistic depending on which variable moves first.
Migration complexity side is also not straightforward. Cryptographic primitives tend to be deeply embedded in ways that are not always easy to find. FWIW, we built a free scanning tool for developers to find and remediate cryptographic vulnerabilities in their repos (still in beta: https://app.threatpoint.com).
2029 might be conservative or optimistic depending on which variable moves first.
If it’s three years away that means state-level actor(s) has it now.
I wonder what a quantum backdoor would look like.
I wonder what a quantum backdoor would look like.
My sense is that if a threat actor were able to build a quantum computer to the scale of being able to compromise public-key primitives based on the difficulty of integer factorization and discrete logarithms under the key sizes used in practice today, one of the highest-valued targets will be Bitcoin.
There is no billion-dollar annual market for quantum compute usage in private industry. Yet these companies are getting billions, and it ain't all grants, stocks, bonds, and notes. Ain't rocket science.
Of course such a model cannot predict a fundamental breakthrough nor can it predict whether there is some kind of fundamental limit to the size of such a quantum system before we have coherence collapse. This is an interesting question for quantum mechanics however.
In summary, quantum computing feels analogous to fusion, a technology that’s always 20 years away.
Oh and don’t get me started on AGI. Lol.