Factoring 2048-bit Numbers Using 20 Million Qubits

This theoretical paper shows how to factor 2048-bit RSA moduli with a 20-million qubit quantum computer in eight hours. It’s interesting work, but I don’t want overstate the risk.

We know from Shor’s Algorithm that both factoring and discrete logs are easy to solve on a large, working quantum computer. Both of those are currently beyond our technological abilities. We barely have quantum computers with 50 to 100 qubits. Extending this requires advances not only in the number of qubits we can work with, but in making the system stable enough to read any answers. You’ll hear this called “error rate” or “coherence” — this paper talks about “noise.”

Advances are hard. At this point, we don’t know if they’re “send a man to the moon” hard or “faster-than-light travel” hard. If I were guessing, I would say they’re the former, but still harder than we can accomplish with our current understanding of physics and technology.

I write about all this generally, and in detail, here. (Short summary: Our work on quantum-resistant algorithms is outpacing our work on quantum computers, so we’ll be fine in the short run. But future theoretical work on quantum computing could easily change what “quantum resistant” means, so it’s possible that public-key cryptography will simply not be possible in the long run. That’s not terrible, though; we have a lot of good scalable secret-key systems that do much the same things.)

Posted on October 14, 2019 at 6:58 AM • 46 Comments