Will quantum computers crack cryptographic codes and cause a global security disaster? You might certainly get that impression from a lot of news coverage, the latest of which reports new estimates that it might be 20 times easier to crack such codes than previously thought.
Cryptography underpins the security of almost everything in cyberspace, from wifi to banking to digital currencies such as bitcoin. Whereas it was previously estimated that it would take a quantum computer with 20 million qubits (quantum bits) eight hours to crack the popular RSA algorithm (named after its inventors, Rivest–Shamir–Adleman), the new estimate reckons this could be done with 1 million qubits.
