Personally I find quantum computers really impressive, and they havent been given its righteous hype.
I know they won't be something everyone has in their house but it will greatly improve some services.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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I think the big breakthrough was in cryptography, and yeah, most people don't care. All of your passwords will be useless against brute force attacks in 10-15 years from it tho!
But we already have quantum proof passwords nowadays.
Even "quantum proof" passwords are trivially broken if quantum computers allow us to practically solve p=np.
That's a pretty big assumption though, and even then you can just switch to a new password format that allows for passwords that aren't solvable using mathematical means. e.g. my password is to fill in a picture on 10x10 grid using 10 different colours. There's no mathematical basis to guess my picture and there are more posibilites than there are particles in the observable universe.
That's perfectly solveable with math. Each grid square can take 10 colors, so there are 10^100 possibilities. That's about 330 bits of entropy, or equivalent to a 51 character password. That's gross overkill if the underlying cryptosystem isn't broken, but insufficient if it is (depending on the details).
Cryptography routinely deals with much, much larger numbers than what you're suggesting (e.g. any RSA key), and even those get broken occasionally.
It's no more an assumption than "Our current quantum-proof passwords are secure against a type of computer that is entirely conceptual at current time."