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NIST Asks Public For Help With Quantum-Proof Cryptography (securityledger.com)
chicksdaddy quotes a report from The Security Ledger: With functional, quantum computers on the (distant?) horizon, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is asking the public for help heading off what it calls "a looming threat to information security:" powerful quantum computers capable of breaking even the strongest encryption codes used to protect the privacy of digital information. In a statement Tuesday, NIST asked the public to submit ideas for "post-quantum cryptography" algorithms that will be "less susceptible to a quantum computer's attack." NIST formally announced its quest in a publication on The Federal Register. Dustin Moody, a mathematician at NIST said the Institute's main focus is developing new public key cryptography algorithms, which are used today to protect both stored and transmitted information. "We're looking to replace three NIST cryptographic standards and guidelines that would be the most vulnerable to quantum computers," Moody said. They are FIPS 186-4, NIST SP 800-56A and NIST SP 800-56B. Researchers have until November, 2017 to submit their ideas. After the deadline, NIST will review the submissions. Proposals that meet the "post-quantum crypto" standards set up by NIST will be invited to present their algorithms at an open workshop in early 2018.
Here's a good wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... summarizing the known approaches. Interestingly, most symmetric encryption schemes seem to be secure (you just need to increase the key size apparently): it's the public/private schemes that are in trouble.
The reason the D-Wave doesn't "break" RSA is that it can only do quantum annealing, which as you say is basically a search algorithm. It does not give exponential increases in efficiency like a theoretical "complete" quantum processor would. For instance, using Shor's algorithm one can factor an N bit number in time something like O(log^2 N), compared to the best algorithm on a classical computer which is something like O(N^(1/3)). In the best case, quantum annealing allows one to do a search which would normally take O(N) time on a classical computer instead in O(sqrt(N)) = O(N^(1/2)). It does not break any "complexity barriers" like a real quantum computer would, just lets you solve certain problems a bit faster.
This is a really big increase in efficiency, say going from a month worth of computation to solve a problem down to just an hour. But it is not anywhere near enough to break factoring since it would hypothetically take thousands of years to break on a classical computer. In fact, the best classical algorithm is actually slightly faster than quantum annealing because we happen to know that factoring is a problem that requires sub-exponential time to solve, O(N^(1/3)) on a classical computer vs O(N^(1/2)) on a D-Wave.