Worry about Quantum Computers breaking Encryption?

Is no one considering this technology more dangerous than AGI or climate change? The claim that quantum computers are going to break every single encryption in seconds—breaking the whole internet and the world with it—might sound terrifying. But it’s not entirely true.

It doesn’t get every encryption. There are post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) methods released by NIST, which probably work.

Most symmetric ciphers, authentication signatures, and hashing are safe. Only key exchanges are in danger, and it will be solved. There are already lattice-based cryptographic methods and others that are resistant. NIST has even released its first PQC standard.

Besides, quantum computers today are extremely expensive and nowhere near as fast as traditional computers on the problems they are supposed to be more efficient for. There’s no record of them breaking RSA-256 or even similarly obsolete keys of tiny sizes. Give it 20 or so years, and maybe I’ll start to worry.

I quite trust this, because it’s feasible to crack RSA even on binary computers. You don’t have to use factorization to crack it. Literally, you need to rewrite (a mod b) as a + xb on both sides, then add another equation from (a^p) = a^(p-1) * a. Crunch the equations until you finish them, plug in (3) as a message, and you can derive the private key from the public.

The math is solid. We just don’t know if it’s possible to actually build a useful quantum computer. Maybe the universe has prepared a bunch of laws of physics to prevent us from creating huge arrays of entangled states.

So, should we worry about encryption? For now, it’s not as scary as it sounds. Solutions are in place, and quantum computers still have a long way to go.