Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Computing Not an Imminent Threat To Public Encryption
Bruce Schneier's latest blog entry points out an interesting analysis of how quantum computing will affect public encryption. The author takes a look at some of the mathematics involved with using a quantum computer to run a factoring algorithm, and makes some reasonable assumptions about the technological constraints faced by the developers of the technology. He concludes that while quantum computing could be a threat to modern encryption, it is not the dire emergency some researchers suggest.
Uff, I meant Applied Cryptography . Practical Cryptography is a bit too basic an overview written with a co-author.
Bruce didn't actually write that article. He only linked to it on his blog, which isn't particularly relevant. And, although Bruce is a brilliant cryptographer, he doesn't know squat about quantum computers, nor does the person that wrote that article. One of the most glaring errors is corrected in comment posted on the article page. Besides that, his argument isn't completely sound. The biggest problem with quantum computers isn't managing to build one with a tons of quantum gates, it's getting the error rate down on the components. If you do that, you ought to be able to build as many gates as you want with enough effort and money. The author's argument seems akin to saying we couldn't possibly build a 100-billion transistor count processor today. We could, its just going to be very expensive and you're not going to mass-produce it.
Right now a lot of people working in the field say quantum computers are about 40 years off. The scary thing though is how its likely to play out. For a few decades quantum computers will likely remain "40 years off" (in the fusion sense), but then someone is going to figure out how to get the error rates below threshold, and then quantum computers will be only 10 years away. That doesn't give us much time to stop using our favorite public key algorithms. That's too bad for nTru; (they have a public key system that is likely resistant to quantum computers), their patents will be long expired.
Your data is both encrypted and unencrypted at the same time, only reverting to one state or the other when you observe it and collapse the waveform. There is also, if I read this correctly, some chance that it will turn into a cat.
Hope that clears it up for you...
The darned things would be like oracles, just ask them any super hard question, like how to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and they'd just spit out the answer. The things would be like talking directly to God. Is that even remotely possible? I don't think so. Factoring numbers is just not as hard as any NP complete problem.
You might as well conclude that grass is purple, for all the sense that paragraph makes.
He makes an extremely cogent argument, but it is hampered by the lack of information we have about the state of the art in quantum computers.
Domestic spying is massively popular with western governments right now, and if you think that the NSA and GCHQ aren't doing secret research into quantum computers you are out of your mind. Furthermore, it is a commandment of signals intelligence that you do not let the enemy know you have broken his code - and in this case the enemy is us. We have no idea how far along they are. We have no idea what the generational length is for the quantum computers that are certainly being developed in secret.
Basically, this essay could be published and make just as much sense either before or after a critical breakthrough had been made by one of the aforementioned agencies and they hadn't told anyone. Thus, we have no way of knowing if we are already past that point or not.
Given that it has already been shown that quantum computers are not infallible, would it not make sense now to start working on encryption methods designed to flummox them?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'm afraid you'll have to look those physics books back up.
Although QM computers do use basic entanglement for creating superpositions, understanding Shor's algorithm (the one everyone is concerned about since it's factoring in polynomial time) is mostly just understanding QM superposition. Entanglement gives generic QM computers great parallel processing power by superposition by explaining how QM probability wave combine under superposition, but Heisenberg limits the computing power of a QM computer in a non-trivial way as well because after you collapse the wave functions by measurement you give up the parallel processing enabled by Entanglement (e.g., if you peek inside the oven, it stops working, if some of the heat leaks out of the oven even with the door closed, it doesn't work as efficiently, the oven being the QM computer).
FWIW, Shor's algorithm essentially converts factoring into a sequence period finding exercise. You might imagine that that's something easy to do if you had a machine which given a bunch of superimposed waves with a certain modulo structure could tell you the period (hint the ones that don't modulo with a specific period with self interfere and measure as zero, where the one with that period with self-reinforce). With a QM computer you do this all in parallel with superimposed probability waves and when you measure it, the highest probability one you measure is the one that doesn't self-interfere (the ones that self-interfere has probability near zero). Basically this measurement is wave function collapse which doesn't actually depend on entanglement or heisenberg to understand (although it does require you to believe in QM wave functions and measurement operators).
Entanglement is really a strange artifact of QM that explains probability correlations that you see in QM experiments that can't be explained classically. It's really more of an artifact of the existance of probability amplitude waves (the QM wave function) rather than an effect that directly enables the QM computer. Of course if you didn't have QM wave functions you wouldn't have a QM computer so I guess that's a chicken and egg scenario. Entanglement is like the "carburator" function of the QM computer. The QM computer uses superposition of QM wave functions to work and when you have more than one QM wave function, they get entangled when you start superimposing wave functions and the way the waves entangle helps you compute in parallel so it's important to understand how these waves entangle.
Heisenberg's principle is a consequence of wave function collapse (measurement) which also limits the QM computer (this limiting effect is often called QM de-coherence). Heisenberg isn't required by a QM computer when it's computing, but you need to see the result somehow so when you measure the result, one of the side effects is the Heisenberg principle (although that's also a chicken-egg problem, since HP is a consequence of QM wave function collapse and w/o QM there's no superposition computing). The closest explanation I can think of is that Heisenberg's principle is the "heat" caused by friction of the QM computer. You need friction to stop the computer to read out the result, but at the same time you can't get rid of a little friction while it's running either (causing de-coherence). The side effect of this friction is heat.
You may have a personal opinion that superposition is a "nice way of doing statistics using discrete values for covering the not so discrete results of experiments", but there is experimental evidence that your personal opinions is at odds with physical reality. As QM computers that do QM computing (including IBM's NMR experiment which implemented shor's algorithm) have already been implemented it's hard to refute that something non-classical is going on.
It may be that in the end, QM is total malarky and there's some other weird unexpected thing going on, but there are mountains of evidence that whatever is going on, it isn't as simple as "hidden variables"