[HN Gopher] Mysterious export controls on quantum computers
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Mysterious export controls on quantum computers
Author : draazon
Score : 20 points
Date : 2024-07-05 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| jzemeocala wrote:
| Hmmm.... I wonder if someone has finally cracked RSA or its
| friends.
|
| I also remember a conspiracy theory that Bitcoin was actually
| made as a litmus test to know if\when someone somewhere achieves
| quantum supremacy (because then they would be able to crack the
| block....or something like that
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The NSA and their ilk would not have waited for AES to be
| broken. They would move to ban these things in response to
| theoretical albeit confident assessment of the risk.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Hmm, that doesn't sound right to my ear.
|
| They've loudly assumed it is possible.
|
| c.f. Their focus has been on incentivizing private actors to
| do post-quantum algorithms, yesterday.
|
| c.f. most recently,
| https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/advancing-our-amazing-
| bet-...
|
| Do you have more info on why they'd ban import of it? Seems
| like an obviously wrong strategy to combat it.
| alwa wrote:
| Aren't these export controls rather than import controls?
| That is, if a company in their bloc does succeed at
| developing cryptographically-relevant quantum computers,
| they'd just as soon that company not sell that tech on to
| the adversary?
|
| As you said, they've loudly assumed it's possible--so
| wouldn't it make sense for them to draw a line in the sand
| now, _before_ the horse has bolted, to indicate where the
| "now it's a national security matter" threshold lies?
| Hizonner wrote:
| I would put a fairly large wager on it just being bureaucratic
| dumbassitosity, and give you odds.
| davidgerard wrote:
| there was some crazy around bitcoin and quantum, led by Vitalik
| Buterin when he was young and foolish
| https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/
| spacecadet wrote:
| Whats mysterious? When I led a team working on some government
| funded encryption stuff a few years ago, everyone in gov was
| terrified of post-quantum cryptography. 10x a day I had to answer
| questions about PQKD.
|
| Maybe some very well funded quantum projects have made certain
| implementations broken- but it never really mattered, because why
| have PQKD when you have XKCD. lol
|
| Id still employ social engineering, deepfakes, and violence over
| the cost of building a machine.
|
| By the way, we all know the Cloudflare lava lamps? I built a
| laser diode/beam splitter random number generator at home, fun
| toy.
| Yoric wrote:
| I've seen a recent paper that claims that they have
| successfully executed one (single) instance of Grover's
| algorithm using existing commercial quantum hardware, with lots
| of hypotheses and lots of manual intervention.
|
| We'll get there, but I don't think that anybody has
| reasonably/reproducibly broken RSA using a quantum computer
| just yet.
| asdff wrote:
| When you think of the significance of being able to break
| encryption like this, it stands to reason that tech that
| achieves these capabilities would be born secret.
| Yoric wrote:
| I'm not sure.
|
| Quantum computing is based on a series of scientific
| breakthroughs and still needs quite a few scientific and
| technological breakthroughs in several domains before it
| becomes viable for cryptography (in other fields, we're
| much closer), in addition to lots of custom hardware.
|
| It's extremely rare (and unpredictable) for a scientist to
| achieve any kind of breakthrough entirely on their own.
| They need to exchange ideas with other scientists from all
| over the world. So you pretty much need your scientists are
| to do their research largely in public - it _might_ be
| possible to emulate this if you have a large enough number
| of scientists on some kind of secret campus, but you'll
| need to make sure that you're hiring top scientists _and_
| you 're hurting their ability to both learn and teach the
| future top scientists you're also going to need _and_ their
| disappearance from the public track will attract lots of
| attention.
|
| Add to this the custom hardware, which will quite often
| come from another country, and it's really hard to keep the
| big things secret.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Secrets are near impossible to keep beyond 1 person.
| fsh wrote:
| There's no mystery here. One country came up with some arbitrary
| criteria, and the other countries copied them.
| HillRat wrote:
| Yeah, I suspect. As the article notes, it might be related to
| quantum simulation limits (e.g., QISKIT can't IIRC simulate
| more than 32 qubits), or taken from the literature on using
| Grover's alg to attack S-AES, but it feels pretty arbitrary to
| me (though I haven't been current on quantum computing for
| several years now).
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussions
|
| (15 points, 2 days ago, 6 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40865218
|
| (20 points, 17 hours ago, 8 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40879417
| Yoric wrote:
| Could be related to the Russian announcement, a few weeks ago,
| that they have built a 30 qubit computer (which may or may not be
| reasonably true - in the field, everybody has a different
| definition of "qubit", "computer" and even "have").
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