ENCRYPTION MAY BE AT RISK

One big question is whether encryption systems are at risk with quantum computers. The major concern is the RSA encryption scheme. The scheme is secure because it relies on the condition that factoring a large number into its primes is too timeconsuming. When trying to find the prime numbers, there are many strategies, so the simplest one is to guess and try. A trial and error approach isn’t practical, though, since a 2,048 -bit number has millions of solutions. Some strategies can reduce the number of possible solutions, but even the most powerful methods will take years or millions of years. With the right algorithms, a quantum computer could reduce that time to a practical level. Efforts are underway to create other algorithms that are not breakable this way.

While this is prudent, the risk that a quantum computer can do this within 15 years is low. Today’s quantum computers are both small and hard to program. The frameworks available for programming are few and far between. As you can see in other parts of this article, you’ll still be setting a few qubit states and twisting the states. Converting that to a fine-tuned encryption-cracker is, more than likely, a far-off prospect for now.