This is what the breakthrough of China’s RSA quantum computers means for cryptographic security.

A Chinese research team used quantum computers to successfully consider 22-bit RSA integers, meaning a breakthrough in cryptographic decoding. What does it mean for cryptographic security?

According to a report from Earth.com, a team of researchers at Shanghai University considered 22-bit keys using a team of researchers at Shanghai University using a new method of converting tasks into a format that Quantum Machine can handle.

RSA, short for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, is a public key cryptography system commonly used for secure data transmission. Systems that use encryption systems include online bank accounts, web browsers, email providers, messaging services, VPNs and cloud services.

Although 22-bit is still a small number compared to the larger 2,048-bit key or the 3072-bit used in actual encryption, breakthroughs are important as quantum computing has proven to be able to achieve beyond previous 19-bit records.

By fine-tuning the model parameters, researchers have increased success rates and demonstrated how future approaches can scale more bits. This means that in the future, more computational resources per bit can lead to decoding of unbreakable RSAs.

As a result, many institutions, such as the NIST and the White House, have already implemented quantum-safe standards, urging institutions and businesses to switch to post-Quantum encryption, warning against the “Harvest Now, Decrypt Late” attack.

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Does cryptocurrency use RSA encryption?

Although RSA is widely used in many aspects of our digital systems, most modern cryptocurrencies do not use encryption to sign transactions or wallet security. Instead, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) rely heavily on elliptic curve encryption or ECC.

This is true, but crypto space utilizes the encryption model in other areas of security criticality. For example, certain crypto exchanges, custody services, and payment platforms may use RSA encryption for their SSL/TLS infrastructure.

Additionally, some cold storage systems or older wallets containing old cryptographic projects and sensitive information may rely on RSA for internal key storage or backup encryption. The same applies to encrypted data archives and backups of encrypted custodians or blockchain companies.

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Why is RSA quantum breakthrough important for ECC?

The experiment applies to RSA, but this does not mean that ECC is out of control. Both RSA and ECC are vulnerable to quantum attacks via Shor’s algorithm. Shor’s algorithm is a quantum algorithm that efficiently considers many and solves discrete logarithmic problems.

Algorithms pose a major threat to the security of many modern cryptosystems. This does not pose a threat to today’s more advanced cryptosystems, but it shows that quantum brings progress as well as theoretical concepts.

The deeper problem is that if quantum hardware is able to scale factoring algorithms, ECC decoding is not too late. A powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can bypass ECC by forging blockchain transactions, destroying encrypted communications between the wallet and nodes, and allowing private keys to be accessed from public BTC or ETH wallets.

In the meantime, Crypto projects need to remain vigilant and prevent security violations by performing audits in vulnerable areas such as TLS certificates, API encryption, VPNs, and off-chain key management.

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