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Azures_Anvil t1_iwnmhfy wrote

I heard that quantum computers would render all of our current methods of encryption useless. Is this true and how is that possible?

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mfukar t1_iwyg4re wrote

No - not all. What most people refer to when they say something like this is public-key cryptography. That is because Peter Shor found an algorithm to factorise an integer efficiently and thus solve the problem some PKI relies on in time that classical computers cannot. What's more fascinating, is that we're approaching quantum computers with enough qubits to examine quantum Fourier transforms, which might allow us to see a realistic, albeit large, implementation of Shor pretty soon.

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