RSA's Demise From Quantum Attacks is Very Much Exaggerated, Expert Says

Freeman writes:

Expert says the focus on quantum attacks may distract us from more immediate threats:

Three weeks ago, panic swept across some corners of the security world after researchers discovered a breakthrough that, at long last, put the cracking of the widely used RSA encryption scheme within reach by using quantum computing.

Scientists and cryptographers have known for two decades that a factorization method known as Shor's algorithm makes it theoretically possible for a quantum computer with sufficient resources to break RSA. That's because the secret prime numbers that underpin the security of an RSA key are easy to calculate using Shor's algorithm. Computing the same primes using classical computing takes billions of years.
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The paper, published three weeks ago by a team of researchers in China, reported finding a factorization method that could break a 2,048-bit RSA key using a quantum system with just 372 qubits when it operated using thousands of operation steps. The finding, if true, would have meant that the fall of RSA encryption to quantum computing could come much sooner than most people believed.

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