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Chinese Scientists Claim to Have Cracked RSA Encryption: Is the Quantum Revolution Here?
Chinese Scientists Claim to Have Cracked RSA Encryption: Is the Quantum Revolution Here?
Recently, Chinese scientists made headlines by claiming successful decryption of RSA encryption using a quantum computer. RSA is a widely-used method for securing data online, so the claim has attracted significant attention. However, there’s a crucial detail — the researchers used a D-Wave quantum computer with quantum annealing to decrypt a 50-bit RSA integer, which is far smaller than the 1024- or 2048-bit keys used in current encryption standards. While noteworthy, it’s important to understand the limitations of this achievement.
Significance of the Claim
Quantum computers have the theoretical potential to break traditional encryption, but the practical timeline is still uncertain. The Chinese team used a D-Wave Advantage machine with 5,760 qubits, but modern RSA encryption uses key sizes much larger than the 50-bit integer they decrypted. A typical 1024-bit key has around 1.8 x 10³⁰⁸ possible values — orders of magnitude larger than the 50-bit case. In practical terms, the current claim does not threaten private data security.
