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Chinese researchers reportedly said they have successfully cracked encryption algorithms used in banking and cryptocurrency using a quantum computer.
Researchers at Shanghai University, led by Wang Chao, said they used a quantum computer manufactured by Canada's D-Wave Systems to crack algorithms through quantum annealing, which involves finding the lowest energy state, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Oct. 11.
The researchers targeted the Present, Gift-64, and Rectangle algorithms, the backbone of the Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) framework, which supports the advanced encryption standards (AES) widely used to encrypt cryptocurrency wallets.
AES-256, in particular, is considered one of the most secure encryption standards available, but researchers say quantum computers could soon become a threat, and this breakthrough could pose a serious threat to long-standing password protection mechanisms.
In Wang's paper, the quantum annealing technique they describe is similar to an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of optimizing solutions on a global scale.
Traditional algorithms explore every path, but in quantum tunneling, particles pass through barriers rather than over them, allowing a quantum computer to find the lowest point more efficiently, bypassing obstacles that standard methods would normally have difficulty reproducing.
"This is the first time that a real quantum computer poses a real and significant threat to the many full-scale structured SPN algorithms in use today", Wang's team said.
Quantum computing has become a long-feared watershed moment in the cryptocurrency industry. Computers capable of breaking encryption can provide thieves with user funds in large volumes and at high speed.
There is no single point of failure for blockchains: to attack them, you need to take over 51% of the network's computing power
Despite the progress, the researchers said that the limitations will still prevent full-fledged quantum hacking, at least for now, due to environmental factors, hardware limitations, and the difficulty of developing a single attack algorithm capable of hacking multiple systems.
At the same time, the researchers said that the quantum computer attack did not reveal specific passwords used in the tested algorithms; however, they have been more successful than before.
They noted that further developments could lead to more robust quantum attacks in the future and reveal potential new vulnerabilities in existing cryptographic systems.
The results were documented in a peer-reviewed paper published Sept. 30 in the China Computer Federation (CCF) Chinese Journal of Computers.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has already proposed a way to reduce the risk of quantum computing in the future, explaining in a post on March X that a simple hard fork could solve the problem.
Buterin says that the blockchain will have to do a hard fork and users will have to download new wallet software, but only a few will lose their funds.
He also believes that the infrastructure needed to implement a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain could theoretically "start building tomorrow".
Source
Researchers at Shanghai University, led by Wang Chao, said they used a quantum computer manufactured by Canada's D-Wave Systems to crack algorithms through quantum annealing, which involves finding the lowest energy state, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Oct. 11.
The researchers targeted the Present, Gift-64, and Rectangle algorithms, the backbone of the Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) framework, which supports the advanced encryption standards (AES) widely used to encrypt cryptocurrency wallets.
AES-256, in particular, is considered one of the most secure encryption standards available, but researchers say quantum computers could soon become a threat, and this breakthrough could pose a serious threat to long-standing password protection mechanisms.
In Wang's paper, the quantum annealing technique they describe is similar to an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of optimizing solutions on a global scale.
Traditional algorithms explore every path, but in quantum tunneling, particles pass through barriers rather than over them, allowing a quantum computer to find the lowest point more efficiently, bypassing obstacles that standard methods would normally have difficulty reproducing.
"This is the first time that a real quantum computer poses a real and significant threat to the many full-scale structured SPN algorithms in use today", Wang's team said.
Quantum computing has become a long-feared watershed moment in the cryptocurrency industry. Computers capable of breaking encryption can provide thieves with user funds in large volumes and at high speed.
There is no single point of failure for blockchains: to attack them, you need to take over 51% of the network's computing power
Despite the progress, the researchers said that the limitations will still prevent full-fledged quantum hacking, at least for now, due to environmental factors, hardware limitations, and the difficulty of developing a single attack algorithm capable of hacking multiple systems.
At the same time, the researchers said that the quantum computer attack did not reveal specific passwords used in the tested algorithms; however, they have been more successful than before.
They noted that further developments could lead to more robust quantum attacks in the future and reveal potential new vulnerabilities in existing cryptographic systems.
The results were documented in a peer-reviewed paper published Sept. 30 in the China Computer Federation (CCF) Chinese Journal of Computers.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has already proposed a way to reduce the risk of quantum computing in the future, explaining in a post on March X that a simple hard fork could solve the problem.
Buterin says that the blockchain will have to do a hard fork and users will have to download new wallet software, but only a few will lose their funds.
He also believes that the infrastructure needed to implement a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain could theoretically "start building tomorrow".
Source
