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China hacks military-grade encryption with a quantum computer, sparking major concerns in the West
Chinese researchers have announced an alarming technological breakthrough that could pose a threat to global military and financial security. Using a quantum computer D-Wave, they claim to have managed to hack a world-class encryption algorithm military, marking what may be the first successful quantum attack on widely used cryptographic systems.
D-Wave Advantage, the system employed by the researchers, was initially designed for non-cryptographic use, but it breached the security of Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN)-based algorithms.
While no specific passwords have been compromised so far, experts warn that the feat could signal the beginning of an era where traditional cryptography could become vulnerable to quantum computing.
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Quantum computing and the tunneling effect
In recent years, quantum computing has been seen as a promising field with the potential to revolutionize tech, but it has also been followed with concern due to its ability to break cryptographic codes.
The D-Wave system, unlike universal quantum computers that rely on technologies such as error-correcting codes, demonstrates a steady growth trajectory, according to the Chinese researchers. One of D-Wave’s main advantages is its “quantum tunneling” effect, which allows it to “jump” out of local extremes where traditional algorithms would get stuck.
This tunneling effect, likened to a ball finding the lowest point on rough terrain, allows D-Wave to quickly optimize its search for solutions, something that traditional algorithms would take much longer to achieve. In the world of cryptography, this ability poses a significant threat.
Attack on the RSA algorithm
The researchers' focus was the attack on the RSA encryption algorithm, one of the most used in secure transactions on the internet.
They introduced two technical approaches based on the quantum annealing algorithm, one of them using a purely quantum algorithm, while the other combines quantum annealing with classical algorithms.
The idea is to convert the cryptographic attack into a combinatorial optimization problem, which can be solved by quantum models such as Ising or QUBO.
One of the major achievements described in the study was the decomposition of a two-million-level integer using D-Wave Advantage, a first in the field.
The goal is to find solutions in exponential space, something that is beyond the reach of traditional computing. The researchers detail that this advance was possible by optimizing multiplication tables and saving qubit resources.
Potential threat to global security
Modern cryptography is a cornerstone of global cybersecurity, protecting financial transactions, military communications, and sensitive government and corporate data.
The ability of a quantum computer to break algorithms like RSA poses a direct risk to these infrastructures. While the attack reported by the researchers is still in its early stages and did not compromise specific data, the technological advance is an indication that traditional encryption may no longer be secure.
Quantum computing has been identified as a potential threat to data security for some time, but the advances demonstrated by China take this threat to a new level.
According to the study published in Chinese Journal of Computers, the quantum annealing algorithm, by exploiting the tunneling effect, allows finding solutions in an N-dimensional network much more efficiently than traditional methods.
This technology, which has the potential to optimize attacks on cryptographic components, could in the future compromise data on a large scale, from military information to international financial transactions. Countries and companies around the world, especially in the West, will need to review their security protocols and adopt new encryption methods that can resist quantum computing.
The Future of Cryptography
With this advance, the race to create quantum-proof algorithms, that is, resistant to attacks from quantum computers, intensifies.
Cybersecurity institutions around the world are already developing post-quantum encryption methods, but there is still a long way to go before these solutions are fully implemented.
Meanwhile, the world is watching with concern China’s advances in quantum computing, aware that we are increasingly approaching a new era in digital security. The vulnerability that these computers can impose on current infrastructures demands an urgent response from the international community.
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