Team Constructs Silicon 2-qubit Gate, Enabling Construction of Quantum Computers (phys.org)

monkeyzoo writes: A team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has made a crucial advance in quantum computing. Their advance, appearing in the journal Nature (abstract), demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate — the central building block of a quantum computer — and, significantly, did it in silicon. This makes the building of a quantum computer much more feasible, since it is based on the same manufacturing technology as today's computer industry. Until now, it had not been possible to make two quantum bits 'talk' to each other — and thereby create a logic gate — using silicon. But the UNSW team — working with Professor Kohei M. Itoh of Japan's Keio University — has done just that for the first time. The result means that all of the physical building blocks for a silicon-based quantum computer have now been successfully constructed, allowing engineers to finally begin the task of designing and building a functioning quantum computer.

Comments

Re:Well there goes the cipherhood

[Junta]

Of course the issue being that AES isn't useful in many contexts without key exchange, which is generally rooted in asymmetric algorithms. Pre-shared key circumstances exist, but are exceptionally rare and not particularly feasible in most internet contexts.

Such a strategy using username/password as foundation of the strategy can work once a relationship is boot strapped, but no good way to bootstrap a new secure relationship.

Re:Well there goes the cipherhood

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Well AES, Twofish, serpent, etc. were all designed with quantum computers in mind hence the 256 bit key lengths. To brute force with even with quantum computers it takes more energy than can be reasonably harvested from our sun. What I wonder is if there are other weaknesses in symmetric key crypto that can be exploited with quantum computers that aren't a brute force attack. This is where the interesting results will happen.