Quantum Computer Not Ready To Break Public Key Encryption For At Least 10 Years, Some Experts Say (theregister.co.uk)

physburn writes: The Register has spoken to some experts to get a better understanding of the risk quantum computers present to the existing encryption systems we have today. Richard Evers, cryptographer for a Canadian security biz called Kryptera, argues that media coverage and corporate pronouncements about quantum computing have left people with the impression that current encryption algorithms will soon become obsolete. But they will not be ready for at least 10 years, he said. As an example, Evers points to remarks made by Arvind Krishna, director of IBM research, at The Churchill Club in San Francisco last May, that those interested in protecting data for at least ten years "should probably seriously consider whether they should start moving to alternate encryption techniques now." In a post Evers penned recently with his business partner Alastair Sweeny, he contends, "The hard truth is that widespread beliefs about security and encryption may prove to be based on fantasy rather than fact." And the reason for this, he suggests, is the desire for funding and fame.

Comments

The experts say...

[jlv]

The "experts" say "not possible for 10 years".

This means it will likely happen in the next 18 months.

Re:10?

[TechyImmigrant]

I've been led to thinking that it will never be feasible. We don't know yet, but there are good reasons to think it might not pan out - for breaking crypto.

E.G. The energy required to cool a volume of space for an n-qbit machine to temps that will maintain entanglement between the qbits will scale with 2^n. So you spend just as much energy doing it in parallel on a quantum computer as you would in a classical computer serially. This isn't known to be true, but try plotting the size of fridge against n for existing quantum computers and see what the curve looks like.

or

You can't achieve the isolation from the surrounding universe (which is kind of the same thing).

I've seen other arguments about noise presented by physicists, but I haven't grokked them sufficiently,

Quantum computing for physics simulation, as envisioned by Feinman, makes a lot more sense.