(June 5, 2019)

Google‘s Craig Gidney and KTH‘s Martin Ekera demonstrated that a quantum system could crack 2,048-bit RSA encryption with just 20 million quantum bits (qubits), rather than requiring 1 billion qubits as previously theorized, in only eight hours with this technique.

The technique uses modular exponentiation, a mathematical process for finding the remainder when a number is raised to a certain power and divided by another number.

Gidney and Ekera have formulated various ways to optimize this process, reducing the resources required to run the large-number-factoring Shor‘s algorithm.