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The hype is in the HN title.
Reading the ETHZ article as well as the paper, they both seem pretty accurate and descriptive. Really sad HN is not discussing the actual cool research that was done, but not surprised since physics is outside HN's core competencies.
1. this is not what you think it is, there are caveats and the title is misleading.
2. I feel there is so much hype around quantum computing.
3. It's like nuclear fusion, always 10 years away.
4. Nuclear fusion is at least practical. QC is not.
5. Did they manage to find prime factorization of 17 already? LOL
6. Cryptography will be dead, RIP bitcoin and https.
7. No, actually quantum computers are useless.
It's tiring.
I recommend this recent post by Scott Aaronson https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9668
Pretty impressive already yeah, I'm sure either their team or another research team will try to improve the qubit yield. Increasing the atom count could be harder though, I'm not an expert but at some point you run into limits from the size of your lab/cooler/trap.
And yeah 99.9% fidelity is not anything groundbreaking, but it's pretty surprising for a "first try" on a new gate implementation. In contrast superconducting systems have been worked on for years and years with ridiculous amounts of investment and also only get 3 nines of fidelity, and IonQ just recently demonstrated 4 nines fidelity, but only after working on their system for many years too.
The researchers used a 58000 atom system, turned 17000 of them into qubits, and applied their gate to all those qubits simultaneously.
Are you doubting this? On what grounds? It's stated pretty clearly in the paper.
:-D
This title is misleading.
sure this isn't a 17k qubit quantum computer, but it's a step in that direction
and this isn't the only news falling under "this is moving faster then expected"
just one in many which scream "time to take it serious, deadline 2029 try earlier"
---
a year or so(?) ago some investments happened, which made only sense if there had been some unpublished break through in quantum computer hardware (through you never can exclude foolish absurd high Risiko investments). (Sadly I didn't bookmark/safe the relevant articles/analysis, so take with a grain of salt.)
then more recently, google researchers had some break through wrt. quantum algorithms. It can now be generally assumed that 10k qubits (in the right setup) are enough to break 256 elliptic curve cryptography (or 2048bit RSA) _in minutes_!
There where also other hardware breakthrough published, and error correction break throughs etc.
The general consensus of people more knowledgeable in this field then me seems to be going in the direction that you must _finish fully migrate to post quantum cryptography by 2029_.
Note that this isn't a "100% guarantee there are cable quantum computers in 2030", but a "the chance of this happening is too high to not be prepared by then".
Also that is mainly true for webpki, TLS, cloud infrastructure/deployment systems, code signing, etc.
Overall:
- from a academic/paper background 2029 seems to be the deadline to finish migrating to post quantum cryptography
- claudflare agrees and has moved up it's internal deadline to 2029
- same for Google, Google also seem to have prioritized quantum secure authentication over harvest now/decrypt later protections. Which IMHO implies they take that deadline quite serious.
- IBM expect some "moonshot" attacks against high value targets already in 2029 (i.e. ~one year earlier) instead of 2030.
___
Through overall what does that mean for most people?
- If you run some small low security service then probably for now nothing much. But make sure you can move to pq if the tooling (webpki, TLS, etc.) starts supporting it and keep an eye on the topic.
- For webpki, TLS and co having well working and by default supported pq cryptography is paramount. This tech isn't just powering the secure web, it's used far beyond and if broken might be enough to take over large parts of whole cloud providers.
- If you have some very sensitive material, where it's a big problem if it leaks even years later, then you have a problem. Because you probably should have already migrated to post quantum cryptography 1-2 years ago ... Note that symmetric encryption is mostly unaffected. Sure there are a lot of people saying it's "slashed in half" (e.g. 128bit => 64bit) but luckily that isn't fully true. I personally still would go with 256bit where viable, as often there is little reason not to do so. BUT a lot of the ways of sharing/accessing/deriving that secure symmetric key use cryptography which should be assumed to be broken soon.
- for VPNs if they allow complementing the asym. crypto with a symmetric key do that now (e.g. wireguard pre-shared key). But that is for many use cases a hen/egg issue as how do you securely exchange the pre-shared key? So look out for changes in the tooling/ecosystem.
- for DevOps, look out for changes in the ecosystem especially webpki/TLS/certs and look out for tools which have a high chance to not mitigate in time
- for Devs post quantum cryptography often looks like it could "just slot in" but that often isn't fully the case due to very different key sizes and performance characteristics. Look out for it. Also making you system ready to migrate to pq-safety was a recommendation by NSA and pretty much any other national cyber security agency for years by now. Furthermore with the standardization of ML-KEM the recommendation shifted to using that where viable (potentially in a hybrid KEM). So if you now notice that you never bother to check/plane ahead you probably should give it some priority now as you may be found to have acted in neglect which could in unlucky cases turn into legal liabilities.
it isn't "faster" computing
it is "different" computing
like if you make a diagram left side "things computers can do fast", right side "thinks they can't do fast", then quantum computers are like a oval in the middle covering part of both sides
as consequence weather it "outperforms" HPC (in general) is fully meaningless, it likely won't ever do that, but also still will break cryptography anyway
and in general it's commonly used in conjunction with HPC, not as a replacement of it
quantum computers working "different" instead of "faster" is also why we won't see a slow breaking/reducing of cracking time for asymmetric crypto. Because it isn't a slow buildup of speed. It's a overcoming of technical barriers. Once done breaking RSA/ECC on a 128 bit security level will pretty much instantly jump from "infeasible per key" to "in minutes per key".
this is also why even "just" a chance of idk. arbitrary chosen 30% that it will be possible in 2030 would be too much to ignore it... especially if we consider that most computer security out there is coupled to asym. crypto not breaking in one way or another.
and it's not the only "this is moving faster then expected new"
a year or so(?) ago some investments happen which make only sense if there had been some unpublished break through in hardware (through you never can exclude foolish absurd high Risiko investments)
then more recently google researchers had some break through wrt. quantum algorithms, it's not generally assumed that 10k qubits (in the right setup) are enough to break 256 elliptic curve cryptography (or 2048bit RSA) _in minutes_!
and there also where other breakthroughs quantum computer wrt. hardware
the general consensus of people more knowledgeable in this field seems to be going in the direction that you must _finish fully migrate to post quantum cryptography by 2029_.
Note that this isn't a "100% guarantee there are cable quantum computers in 2030", but a "the chance of this happening is too high to not be prepared by then".
Overall:
- from a academic/paper background 2029 seems to be the deadline to finish migrating to post quantum cryptography
- claudflare agrees and has moved up it's internal deadline to 2029
- same for Google, Google also seem to have prioritized quantum secure authentication over harvest now/decrypt later protections, which implies they are seriously worried about their authentication breaking potentially as early as 2030
- IBM expect some "moonshot" attacks against high value targets already in 2029
___
Through overall what does that mean for most people?
- if you run some small low security service then probably for now nothing, but make sure you can move to pq if the tooling (webpki, TLS, etc.) does
- for webpki, TLS and co having well working and by default supported pq cryptography is paramount
- if you have some very sensitive material where it's a big problem if it leaks even years later, then you have a problem because you probably should have already migrated to post quantum cryptography 1-2 years ago ... Note that symmetric encryption is mostly unaffected. Sure there are a lot of people saying it's "slashed in half" (e.g. 128bit => 64bit) but luckily that isn't fully true. I personally still would go with 256bit where viable, often there is little reason not to. BUT a lot of the ways of sharing that symmetric key use encryption which should be assumed to be broken soon.
- for VPNs if they allow complementing the asym. crypto with a symmetric key do that now (e.g. wireguard pre-shared key) but that is for many use cases a hen/egg issue as how do you securely exchange the pre-shared key? So look out for changes in the tooling/ecosystem.
- for DevOps, look out for changes in the ecosystem especially webpki/TLS/certs and look out for tools which have a high chance to not mitigate in time
- for Devs post quantum cryptography often looks like it could "just slot in" but that often isn't fully the case due to very different key sizes and performance characteristics. Look out for it. Also making you system ready to migrate to pq-safety was a recommendation by NSA and pretty much any other national cyber security agency for years by now. Furthermore with the standardization of ML-KEM the recommendation shifted to using that where viable (potentially in a hybrid KEM). So if you now notice that you never bother to check/plane ahead you probably should give it some priority now as you may be found to have acted in neglect which could in unlucky cases turn into legal liabilities.
The “decade away” phenomenon comes from the fact that it’s basically impossible to time estimate innovation.
"Right now" is probably the only one that literally means now as the rest of the English-speaking world would assume.
I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.
AGI? - lol!
With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.
There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.