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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.
To put it in perspective, cracking a 1024-bit RSA key would require a quantum computer with millions of qubits and near-perfect error correction — something beyond the capabilities of current technology. This research is a step forward in quantum computing applications but remains far from scaling to a level that threatens modern security systems.
Understanding Quantum Annealing
The researchers used a technique called quantum annealing, which leverages quantum fluctuations to find optimal solutions efficiently. This approach is faster for some problems compared to classical methods, but it’s different from gate-based quantum computing, which can run Shor’s algorithm — an algorithm theoretically capable of breaking RSA encryption.
Quantum annealing is specialized for optimization problems and lacks the versatility of gate-based quantum computing, which is needed to perform calculations to break RSA encryption at…
