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A new study from Google Researchers is raising questions about whether quantum computing will hamper your ability to keep your crypto wallet secure.
Google’s (GOOGL) Craig Gidney, a quantum research scientist, and Sophie Schmieg, a senior staff cryptography engineer, published a blog post on Friday showing a quantum computer could potentially break RSA encryption — the public-key encryption algorithm used to secure data such as for cryptocurrencies — with 20 times fewer quantum resources than they previously believed.
The researchers said the 20x improvement from a 2019 estimate comes from “better algorithms and better error correction.”
Bitcoin doesn’t use RSA, but rather elliptic curve cryptography, which, according to Coindesk, can be similar and also might be broken with Shor’s algorithm, which was used by the Google researchers. The ability could upend the crypto market, since the blockchain had been said to be virtually unhackable.
While Google’s study doesn’t call out cryptocurrency by name, it still has major implications for how it can be securely stored in the future. And while the machines used in Google’s estimate don’t yet exist, the technology isn’t a pipe dream.
The researchers did note that efforts are already underway to secure these encryptions before such a device may exist.
“NIST recently concluded a PQC competition that resulted in the first set of PQC standards,” they wrote, referencing the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “These algorithms can already be deployed to defend against quantum computers well before a working cryptographically relevant quantum computer is built.”