'No matter what password you use, I will break it in a fraction of a second', one of Israel's cyber pioneers on what quantum computing actually does to encryption

[SchrodingersCat]

Prof. Maj.-Gen. (res.) Isaac Ben-Israel, one of the founding architects of Israel's modern cybersecurity apparatus and former head of the Israel Space Agency, told the Jerusalem Post Podcast that quantum computing will eventually wipe out today's encryption entirely, describing what a mature quantum computer would do to the passwords protecting banks, governments and militaries in blunt terms, no matter what password you use, in a fraction of a second I will break it. The scale of the speed gap he described isn't merely 100 or 1,000 times faster than a classical computer, he put it closer to 10 to the 20th or 30th power, a number he noted we all know how to write down and none of us can really picture

Ben-Israel drew a sharp distinction between two separate areas of quantum research advancing right now, quantum computing and quantum communication. Quantum computing doesn't make hackers better at breaking into a system, it destroys the encryption protecting whatever they find once they're already inside, turning brute force password cracking from an impossibly slow process into something trivial. The fix, he said, comes in two forms, first new post-quantum mathematics that even a quantum machine can't crack in reasonable time, though the algorithms that exist today remain slow and unready for wide adoption, with roughly a 10-year lag expected before industry fully migrates to them

The second and stranger fix, in his view where the world eventually lands, is quantum entanglement itself, since something done on one quantum computer can register on another arbitrarily far away with nothing physically traveling in between, no wire, no signal, nothing to intercept and no password to steal. China has already put a satellite in orbit using exactly this kind of entanglement based communication, and Tel Aviv University students launched a satellite two years ago as an early step toward the same capability. Ben-Israel estimated roughly ten years to solve the main remaining obstacle, interference between quantum elements that gets worse as more are added, but was careful to temper expectations about availability, these will be enormous, ultracold machines drawing enormous amounts of electricity, there will be no more than a few in the world, and a quantum computer in every home is more than 50 years away, if ever

'No matter what password you use, I will break it in a fraction of a second' | The Jerusalem Postwww.jpost.com

[HollywoodHogan92]

The 10 to the 20th or 30th power scale comparison is such a good way to communicate the actual gap, it's not an upgrade, it's a completely different category of speed that normal intuition just can't grasp

[Delulu67]

The distinction between quantum computing breaking encryption versus quantum communication making interception physically impossible is the clearest explanation of these two different fields I've come across

[Leopard85]

No password to steal because nothing travels between the two entangled points at all is one of the stranger implications of physics I've ever tried to wrap my head around

[SilverSurfer51]

The 10 year lag for industry actually adopting post-quantum algorithms once they exist is the detail that should worry people more than the raw quantum computer timeline itself, that's a long exposure window

[NovaPrime]

China already having an operational entanglement based communication satellite while most people have never even heard quantum communication discussed as separate from quantum computing shows how far ahead the practical deployment already is

[Danny47]

A quantum computer in every home being 50 plus years away if ever is a good, honest tempering of expectations, this is never going to be consumer hardware the way computing power historically has been

[Luca]

The ultracold, enormous power draw requirement explaining why big tech is investing in nuclear power specifically to feed these machines ties this directly into a lot of the current AI energy demand conversation too

[SpinState]

This is a clarifying interview for understanding why Q-Day discussions keep splitting into two different, sometimes confused, conversations about breaking existing encryption versus building unbreakable new communication

[SignalFlow Depot]

The interference problem getting worse the more quantum elements you add is exactly the same scaling challenge every quantum computing story eventually comes back to regardless of which country or company is working on it