Debunking Hype: China Hasn't Broken Military Encryption with Quantum

An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes:


Recent headlines have proclaimed that Chinese scientists have hacked "military-grade encryption" using quantum computers, sparking concern and speculation about the future of cybersecurity. The claims, largely stemming from a recent South China Morning Post article about a Chinese academic paper published in May, was picked up by many more serious publications. 

However, a closer examination reveals that while Chinese researchers have made incremental advances in quantum computing, the news reports are a huge overstatement. "Factoring a 50-bit number using a hybrid quantum-classical approach is a far cry from breaking 'military-grade encryption'," said Dr. Erik Garcell, Head of Technical Marketing at Classiq, a quantum algorithm design company. While advancements have indeed been made, the progress represents incremental steps rather than a paradigm-shifting breakthrough that renders current cryptographic systems obsolete. "This kind of overstatement does more harm than good," Dr. Garcell said. "Misrepresenting current capabilities as 'breaking military-grade encryption' is not just inaccurate — it's potentially damaging to the field's credibility...." 

In fact, the Chinese paper in question, titled Quantum Annealing Public Key Cryptographic Attack Algorithm Based on D-Wave Advantage, does not mention military-grade encryption, which typically involves algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Instead, the paper is about attacking RSA encryption (RSA stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, named after its creators)... While factoring a 50-bit integer is an impressive technical achievement, it's important to note that RSA encryption commonly uses key sizes of 2048 bits or higher. The difficulty of factoring increases exponentially with the size of the number, meaning that the gap between 50-bit and 2048-bit integers is astronomically large. 
Moreover, the methods used involve a hybrid approach that combines quantum annealing with classical computation. This means that the quantum annealer handles part of the problem, but significant processing is still performed by classical algorithms. The advances do not equate to a scalable method for breaking RSA encryption as it is used in practical applications today.
 

Duncan Jones, Head of Cybersecurity at Quantinuum, tells Forbes that if China had actually broken AES — they'd be keeping it secret (rather than publicizing it in newspapers).
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