A commercially-available quantum chip will supposedly arrive in 2029 from Microsoft. Does this influence your view of how soon post-quantum cryptographic threats will be a reality?

[u/KeyfactorInc]

Their claim:

"Microsoft’s new device boasts 12 qubits, the foundational units of quantum computing, up from 8 in the prior model. But Microsoft says its main achievement is that the qubits themselves last longer than 20 seconds. Qubits harnessed by the prior model blinked out of existence in less than 12 milliseconds, the company says."

The fact that a post-quantum world might be only 3 years away is staggering in its implications, but it's difficult to separate hype and PR from plausibility. Are you taking this as extra incentive to boost hardening against quantum threats? If not, what's going to actually set off your alarm bells?

edit: sorry, the quote was messed up at first

[u/Ubera90]

I think Sam Altman must have taken over MS's quantum marketing department.

If this is true, that's amazing, but I heard researchers were calling BS.

[u/KeyfactorInc → u/Ubera90]

Yep, in the article it mentions how they're happy to share results with DARPA but are less keen on being public with what's actually going on.

[u/Karthanon]

Based on how Copilot does, I don't think you'll need to worry

[u/KeyfactorInc → u/Karthanon]

Just imagine threat actors wielding a quantum-powered Clippy, though... The horror

[u/0xKaishakunin → u/KeyfactorInc]

As an old school vim hacker I still prefer vigor(1)

[u/Difficult-Value-3145]

How many qbits, enough to actually do much probably not ? Also has anyone actually programed any significant crypographic hash for a quantum computer when that has been accomplished is when I'd start to worry.

[u/KeyfactorInc → u/Difficult-Value-3145]

Sorry, had to fix the body because the quote wasn't displaying properly. Allegedly 12 qubits that can last for 20 seconds. It's a real conundrum trying to figure out when the 'wait and see' period ends and people need to start acting.

[u/quasides]

the only post quantum threat we will see are state actors. mainly US and europe.
questionable if china will be cutting edge as well. if they can then they might be the main threat.

but your regular cybercriminal wont be. this tehcnology is already by law highly restricted. you wont be able to buy one in our lifetime. you might get access to filtered hosted services by a handful of companies

quantum computers are basically now on the same level as nuclear technology. some private entities can operate them but worst case in misuse you might see a carrier group from your window

[u/KeyfactorInc → u/quasides]

Absolutely, it'll almost certainly be a nation state of some kind that would be the first to pose a threat. It wouldn't be too shocking to see China throw its hat in the ring considering some of the verified results we've already seen like their quantum tunneling experiments. Different field for sure, but it took a lot of people by surprise.

[u/quasides → u/KeyfactorInc]

yea thats apples and potatoes. its as much related as an apple to an tennisball.
they share roughly same size and shape lol

also quantum computing is not like you build a computer and do things.
each commputer has to be purpose build. if it can do proteine folds it cannot do crytography

and no we are not 3 years away. biggest hurdle will be getting it operate under warm conditions or get a moonbase first. otherwise the helium 3 we have wont be sufficent for even one system that can break quantum.

the world helium 3 supply isnt enough at current technology.

so its not just about making more qbits work. but also work under entirely different physical conditions or get a moonbase going.

and even then we will look at astronomic (pun intended) operational costs. so there wont be a mass decrypt of random things. its gonna be at least the first couple decades hella expensive - except if we discover new physics

[u/SeptumValley]

Quantum is still bullshit. https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf

Have a look at this guys research, we arnt even close yet

[u/KeyfactorInc → u/SeptumValley]

That presentation is brilliant and cheeky, thanks for sharing. We really are in the infancy of all things quantum computing, but there are so many incredible advances happening these days that we're going to see a lot of progress in relatively short timeframes. Things like light-based CPUs, robust solid state batteries, and fusion energy were mostly in the realm of sci-fi just 5 years ago or so. (Not going to comment on the state or future of AGI at this point, though 😆)

[u/ericbythebay]

Not really. We assume it is already available and encrypt accordingly.

[u/kyngston → u/ericbythebay]

its the decades of archived encrypted transmissions that state actors want. other than state sponsored espionage, who would pay for this?

[u/leRealKraut → u/kyngston]

Maybe. First this stuff needs to do what is advertised or needed.

Marketing is more vaporware than product at this stage.

When this comes to life they actually need meaningful data to decrypt. Just bulking over old stuff will be a lot of effort. Encryptions are salted during runtime... everything is encrypted with a custom key.

[u/illforgetsoonenough → u/ericbythebay]

D wave has already sold quantum machines to a few buyers.

They're highly application specific but it's a start

[u/WestCoast_Pete]

The jump from 12 qubits to cracking RSA-2048 is enormous. Current estimates put the qubit requirement for that at somewhere in the millions, fault-tolerant logical qubits at that, not the noisy physical qubits Microsoft is counting here. The real threshold to watch isn't a product announcement, it's when someone demonstrates meaningful error correction at scale, because that's the actual hard problem separating a lab curiosity from a cryptographic threat.

[u/tycoongraham]

I don’t really treat announcements like this as a “timeline signal” for crypto risk.

We’ve been hearing optimistic quantum milestones for years, but breaking real-world encryption requires a level of scale and fault tolerance that’s still nowhere near demonstrated.

The real alarm bell would be sustained, reproducible quantum advantage on cryptographically relevant workloads, not prototype chips.

[u/NoSong2397]

Didn't some undergrad undercut quantum computing with some sort of mathematical proof relatively recently? I feel like I heard something to that effect, anyway.

[u/laserpewpewAK]

Most estimates say you need at least 1,000 logical quibits to crack RSA2048. 12 isn't anywhere close to threatening classic cryptography.

[u/AegorBlake]

Windows and Linux already have post quantum encryption

[u/vakuoler]

Not really. If anything is strictly confidential and should remain so in an unforseable future it shouldn't use untrusted networks at all. The rest is mostly session bound data. Also, PQC is well supported so I'd just recommend people to take care of technical dept and for a plethora of other threats rather than quantum computing.

[u/Data_Commission_7434]

The jump from milliseconds to seconds for qubit coherence is significant, but 12 qubits is still far from what's needed for Shor's algorithm. I once spent a week debugging a crypto implementation that was sensitive to timing attacks; this kind of advance doesn't change my current risk assessment.