3 ms·

I thought cryptography was the big thing here. Whoever has a big enough one of these could break tls and other encryption. Which means we enter an arms race w

I thought cryptography was the big thing here. Whoever has a big enough one of these could break tls and other encryption. Which means we enter an arms race where we need quantum to build qc-proof encryption before qc gets cheap and easy enough for the bad guys. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/post-quantum-tls/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/post-quantu...

tsimionescu 4y ago
Not really - you don't need QCs to do encryption that (as far as we know right now at least) is just as infeasible to break on QCs as it is on classical computers. For example, most symmetric key algorithms are already QC-safe; in particular, AES would still be safe even in a world where you could build a QC with as many gates as a modern chip. Of course, there is an asterisk here, as the set of all problems for which QCs give exponential/super-polynomial speedups over known classical algorithms is not yet known (not even at the level where we have some confidence that P != NP). Everything I'm claiming is based on currently known quantum algorithms, and on belief about the properties of QCs in general (i.e. that they can only solve more efficiently problems that display certain rare characteristics).