Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cryptography-migration-timeline/

by OJFord • 4 months ago

29 9 4 months ago

blog.google

hammock2• 4 months ago

If it’s three years away that means state-level actor(s) has it now.

I wonder what a quantum backdoor would look like.

adastra222• 4 months ago

On what do you base that assumption?

hammock2• 4 months ago

Experience

esbranson2• 4 months ago

Common sense?

zar10485762• 4 months ago

My sense is that if a threat actor were able to build a quantum computer to the scale of being able to compromise public-key primitives based on the difficulty of integer factorization and discrete logarithms under the key sizes used in practice today, one of the highest-valued targets will be Bitcoin.

esbranson2• 4 months ago

There is no billion-dollar annual market for quantum compute usage in private industry. Yet these companies are getting billions, and it ain't all grants, stocks, bonds, and notes. Ain't rocket science.

mmmBacon• 4 months ago

We are still in a regime where the growth of logical qubits is far below the point of any practical computing utility let alone at a level capable of breaking existing codes. While it’s correct to be proactive at the security end, if you take the current rate of improvement in logical qubits and project it forward you’ll get something beyond 2040. I built a probabilistic model of logical qubit improvement and the median ends up being further out (probably should publish this somewhere). I’d like to point out that I’m not purely negative; I was surprised to calculate we can make enough He-II to make it all go!

Of course such a model cannot predict a fundamental breakthrough nor can it predict whether there is some kind of fundamental limit to the size of such a quantum system before we have coherence collapse. This is an interesting question for quantum mechanics however.

In summary, quantum computing feels analogous to fusion, a technology that’s always 20 years away.

Oh and don’t get me started on AGI. Lol.

zar10485762• 4 months ago

Q-day estimates are sensitive to several factors; e.g., hardware qubit counts, error correction overhead, and algorithmic efficiency (e.g., better factoring approaches could compress the timeline meaningfully without any hardware breakthrough).

Migration complexity side is also not straightforward. Cryptographic primitives tend to be deeply embedded in ways that are not always easy to find. FWIW, we built a free scanning tool for developers to find and remediate cryptographic vulnerabilities in their repos (still in beta: https://app.threatpoint.com).

2029 might be conservative or optimistic depending on which variable moves first.

Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear

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