"Chinese Researchers Claim to Have Broken RSA With a Quantum Computer. Experts Aren't So Sure."
Researchers in China say they have made a quantum computing breakthrough, finding out how to breach the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) public-key encryption system using a quantum computer with the amount of power that will soon be publicly available. Finding a way to consistently and rapidly obtain the algorithm's secret prime numbers would be significant. Although the RSA algorithm has mostly been replaced in consumer-facing protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), it is still commonly used in older enterprise and Operational Technology (OT) software as well as in many code-signing certificates. If an adversary can generate these signing keys or decrypt RSA-protected messages, they could snoop on Internet traffic and potentially pass off malicious code as a genuine software update. This could allow them to seize control of third-party devices. The publication titled "Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor" by Chinese researchers is one of the first works claiming that this can now be accomplished practically. They claim that a 372-qubit quantum computer can break the 2048-bit algorithm. However, there are certain limitations as they could only practice on a 10-qubit device and were unable to demonstrate their hypothesis on anything more than 48 bits. Many experts are calling their findings into question. This article continues to discuss Chinese researchers' claim to have successfully broken the RSA public-key encryption system with a quantum computer and questions surrounding this development.