Last week Google Quantum AI dropped a 57-page whitepaper that should be keeping every blockchain developer awake at night. The headline finding: Shor’s algorithm can break the 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography underpinning Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most of the crypto ecosystem using fewer than half a million physical qubits on a superconducting architecture. Their circuits could execute in about nine minutes–within Bitcoin’s average block time.

… Basically: Google withholds the specific quantum circuit they discovered in the name of responsible disclosure, yet the paper itself constrains the search space so tightly that reproducing comparable circuits is well within reach for any serious quantum algorithms group. Including, I would say, our team at SingularityNET, even though quantum is not our main shtick.

Another point I made to the journalists who asked me about this is: The qubit counts that make these cryptographic attacks feasible are roughly the same qubit counts that make quantum-enhanced AI feasible. So regarding quantum computing, the threat and the capability will arrive on roughly the same time-scale, and if you’re only looking at the threat side, you’re missing half the picture–arguably the more important half. — Read more

Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have concluded. In one, researchers demonstrated the use of neutral atoms as reconfigurable qubits that have free access to each other. They went on to show this approach could allow a quantum computer to break 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) in 10 days while using 100 times less overhead than previously estimated. In a second paper, Google researchers demonstrated how to break ECC-securing blockchains for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in less than nine minutes while achieving a 20-fold resource reduction.

Taken together, the papers are the latest sign that cryptographically relevant quantum computing (CRQC) at utility-scale is making meaningful progress. — Read More

The encryption protecting communications against criminal and nation-state snooping is under threat. As private industry and governments get closer to building useful quantum computers, the algorithms protecting Bitcoin wallets, encrypted web visits, and other sensitive secrets will be useless. No one doubts the day will come, but as the now-common joke in cryptography circles observes, experts have been forecasting this cryptocalypse will arrive in the next 15 to 30 years for the past 30 years.

The uncertainty has created something of an existential dilemma: Should network architects spend the billions of dollars required to wean themselves off quantum-vulnerable algorithms now, or should they prioritize their limited security budgets fighting more immediate threats such as ransomware and espionage attacks? Given the expense and no clear deadline, it’s little wonder that less than half of all TLS connections made inside the Cloudflare network and only 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant TLS connections. It’s all but certain that many fewer organizations still are supporting quantum-ready encryption in less prominent protocols. — Read More

IBM Ventures is treating quantum computing as strategically important as artificial intelligence, targeting startups to build ecosystems that complement its hardware roadmap, according to Global Venturing.

The unit has invested in companies such as Qedma, QunaSys, and Strangeworks while expanding partnerships with universities like the University of Chicago to accelerate commercialization of quantum technologies.

Alongside quantum, IBM Ventures continues to prioritize enterprise-focused AI investments, emphasizing domain-specific tools, automation software, and multi-model strategies. — Read More

On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model using classical computing methods. The hardware, which will be called Starling, is expected to be able to perform 100 million operations without error on a collection of 200 logical qubits. And the company expects to have it available for use in 2029.

Perhaps just as significant, IBM is also committing to a detailed description of the intermediate steps to Starling. These include a number of processors that will be configured to host a collection of error-corrected qubits, essentially forming a functional compute unit. This marks a major transition for the company, as it involves moving away from talking about collections of individual hardware qubits and focusing instead on units of functional computational hardware. If all goes well, it should be possible to build Starling by chaining a sufficient number of these compute units together.

“We’re updating [our roadmap] now with a series of deliverables that are very precise,” IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars, “because we feel that we’ve now answered basically all the science questions associated with error correction and it’s becoming more of a path towards an engineering problem.” — Read More

Microsoft believes it has made a key breakthrough in quantum computing, unlocking the potential for quantum computers to solve industrial-scale problems. The software giant has spent 17 years working on a research project to create a new material and architecture for quantum computing, and it’s unveiling the Majorana 1 processor, Microsoft’s first quantum processor based on this new architecture.

… Majorana 1 can potentially fit a million qubits onto a single chip that’s not much bigger than the CPUs inside desktop PCs and servers. — Read More

Read the Paper

#quantum

When quantum computers become powerful enough, they could theoretically crack the encryption algorithms that keep us safe. The race is on to find new ones.

Cryptographic algorithms are what keep us safe online, protecting our privacy and securing the transfer of information.

But many experts fear that quantum computers could one day break these algorithms, leaving us open to attack from hackers and fraudsters. And those quantum computers may be ready sooner than many people think. 

That’s why there is serious work underway to design new types of algorithms that are resistant to even the most powerful quantum computer we can imagine.  Read More

Xanadu, a Toronto based quantum computing startup, has released their Borealis processor and has made it available on the Xanadu Cloud. They will also make it available soon on the Amazon Braket cloud service. In addition, Xanadu has demonstrated Quantum Supremacy with this device by running a Random Number Sampling experiment on it use Gaussian Boson Sampling. This demonstration is similar to those performed by Google in October 2019 with their superconducting based device and also by the University of Science and Technology China (USTC) with their Gaussian Boson Sampler in December of 2020. Read More

#quantum