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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Quantum Computers Will Make Even "Strong" Passwords Worthless

• https://www.themaven.net

The race is on to perfect quantum computing. It will make your bank passwords and all existing security methods useless.

The Hutch Report has a fascinating 44-page PDF on Quantum Computing.

If perfected, existing methods of encryption will cease to work. Your bank account password and passwords to cryptocurrencies will easily be hackable.

The ability to break the RSA coding system will render almost all current channels of communication insecure.

This is a national security threat.

The benefits are also huge: Quantum computers will be superior at hurricane detection, airplane design, and in searching DNA for markers to help find cures for diseases such as Autism, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's.

Classical Computers

Classical computers use strings of 0's and 1's with a single digit a "bit" and strings of bits a "byte". A bit is either a one or a zero.

Excerpts from the Hutch report now follow. I condensed 44 pages to a hopefully understandable synopsis of the promise and problems of quantum computing.

Quantum Background

Quantum computing does not use bits, but uses qubits which can be one, zero, or both zero and one at the same time. This state or capability of being both is called superposition. Where it gets even more complex is that qubits also exhibit a property called entanglement. Entanglement is an extraordinary behaviour in quantum physics in which particles, like qubits, share the same state simultaneously even when separated by large distance.

As comparison a classic computer using bits of zero and one can only store one state at a time and can represent 2n states where n is the number of bits. In the case of two bits, this would be 2*2 which is four states: 00, 01, 10, 11.


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