RSA is a cryptographic method that encrypts data with a public key and decrypts it with a private key.
Breaching the RSA-2048 algorithm, like other RSA number family algorithms, necessitates determining a number's prime factors with 617 decimal digits and 2048 binary digits. Experts believe that it would take 300 trillion years for ordinary computers to crack an RSA-2048 encryption key. However, Chinese researchers stated in their paper that the encryption could be reversed using a quantum computer with 372 qubits or basic units of information that serve as a proxy for computation power.
In comparison, the latest IBM Osprey quantum computer has 433 qubits of processing capacity. Previously, experts determined by calculating that factoring RSA-2048 with quantum computers using Shor's algorithm, a quantum factoring method, would require 13,436 qubits.
In contrast to classical computers, which operate on a binary basis of 0 or 1, quantum computers use quantum bits that can take on infinite states at temperatures of -273°C (-459.4°F), which are achieved by using liquid gas coolants. As a result, the quantum computer can map out all possible solutions to a cryptographic problem and try them all at once, increasing efficiency by orders of magnitude.
According to American cryptographer Bruce Schneier, Chinese researchers appear to have combined classical lattice reduction factoring techniques with a quantum estimated optimization algorithm to factor 48-bit numbers using a 10-qubit quantum computer effectively.
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