Could RSA-2048 Be Cracked By 2025? (2024)

One highlight for me of 2022 was the publishing of the Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standards by NIST. These were Kyber for Key Exchange and Public Key Encryption, and Dilithium for Digital Signatures. Both of these methods use lattice cryptography, and which is robust against quantum computer attacks. Unfortunately, all of our existing public key methods — RSA, ECC and discrete logs — are not robust against a quantum computer attack, and must be replaced, soon.

We must thus now look at a migration away from our existing methods towards quantum robust methods. What is unknown is the time scale for this migration. But, the US is starting to move on this and asking public sector agencies to identify the places where traditional public key encryption methods are used and to look towards a migration strategy.

But, now a paper has just been published that perhaps speeds up the migration process [here][1]:

In the paper, it is quoted that:

We demonstrate the algorithm experimentally by factoring integers up to 48 bits with 10 superconducting qubits, the largest integer factored on a quantum device. We estimate that a quantum circuit with 372…