The million-dollar question is: Are quantum computers actually capable of breaking the most common forms of online encryption that protect sensitive data, and if so, what’s the best way for organizations to respond to this potential threat? How worried should people be?
Tim Callan is chief experience officer at Sectigo explores these questions that face us.
A reportOpens a new window  published by McKinsey Digital in December 2021 indicated that China is vastly outspending Western countries in quantum computing.
Fast forward to the here and now, where Chinese researchers are asserting that an existing quantum computer has the power to defeat RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) public-key encryption years before the anticipated Quantum ApocalypseOpens a new windowÂ
A little more detail on what exactly is being claimed by these researchers is helpful here, and it requires that we first step back in time a couple of years. In early 2021, German mathematician and cryptographer Claus-Peter Schnorr put out a paperOpens a new window  that walked through a process that was said to be able to break RSA encryption.
Cybersecurity experts who took a closer look at this startling claim and dug into its main premise ultimately concluded that this process was actually not sufficient to break RSA.Â
However, maybe all that was needed was a stronger computer…
This brings us to the most recent paper by a group of Chinese researchers. This report Opens a new window contends that by following the same process that Schnorr outlined, you could break RSA – if you used a quantum computer with 372 qubits. (qubits are, essentially, a measure of a quantum computer’s processing power).
This assertion is alarming because there is already at least one quantum computer in existence today with more qubits than that: IBM’s 433 qubit Osprey computer.
And while the Osprey might be one-of-a-kind at the moment, there are certainly other quantum computers with similar horsepower under development and on the way. Again, as the McKinsey Digital report made clear, nation-states aren’t sleeping on their quantum computing investments.
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