Quantum Computer May Crack Public-Key Encryption

RSA encryption not immune

R. Colin Johnson, EETimes
3/10/2016 11:24 AM EST

LAKE WALES, Fla.—No shortage of encryption and decryption schemes exists, but for those schemes that merely depend on the difficulty of finding the factors of two large prime numbers multiplied together, their days may be numbered, according to a team of researchers.

Known as public-key encryption, this encryption method—the most notable example being the popular Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) scheme —appears to be doomed by quantum computing, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge) theorists working with prototyping experts at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). Using an algorithm invented by MIT professor Peter Shor and made scalable by Professor Alexei Kitaev at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech, Pasadena), a quantum computer was built to prove the concept, as presented in the paper Realization of a Scalable Shor Algorithm.

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