Is China’s quantum computing breakthrough all that?
Weifeng Zhong
Last month, a team of 24 Chinese scientists made waves in cybersecurity circles when it released a quantum computing paper that claimed to have found a way to crack the most common encryptions currently providing online security. Quantum experts didn’t expect that to happen for at least another decade. Is this a cue for the rest of us to panic?
It’s hard even for great minds in quantum computing to judge the validity of the Chinese claim based on science. But if we zoom out from the subject matter and look at the context in which the paper was released, the development would seem less alarming.
The way encryption works is to deter every hacker with a difficult math puzzle, such as figuring out that 491,597 = 593 x 829. It’s easier for you to check my work than to find the answer from scratch, which is where quantum machines come in. In time, quantum computers can be orders of magnitude faster than the classical computers we have today, enabling them to solve puzzles by guesswork quickly enough to potentially break most existing passwords — those created by you, me, or any random employee of the National Security Agency.
GALLAGHER PLANS TO CALL DISNEY’S IGER, NBA’S SILVER TO TESTIFY BEFORE NEW CHINA SELECT COMMITTEE
Scientists have known since 1994 that quantum computers could break codes when the hardware is powerful enough, but that point is still believed to be at least a decade away. The Chinese group came up with an alternative approach that’s less demanding on hardware — so they won’t need to wait a decade — but is still slow and error-prone. This trade-off isn’t trivial; even Peter Shor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who made the milestone discovery of quantum computers’ power in 1994, wasn’t sure if the new idea would be practical.
Less technical but perhaps more interesting is how this paper came to be. The group made the paper public on arXiv, an open platform for releasing drafts of science papers before they’re peer-reviewed or published. More than half of the co-authors are affiliated with two State Key Laboratories, an important mechanism used by Chinese authorities to fund and direct high-value research in science and technology. The authors disclosed funding through 12 grants made by five national and provincial authorities.
SKLs in China are not your ordinary labs. They are among the most favored beneficiaries of the Chinese government’s research and development funding machines. But attached to such great perks are tight strings, including strict regulations to keep secrets. While scientists are encouraged to publish, the publications are required to be reviewed and approved by authorities before seeing the light of day. According to China’s criminal law, ignoring this approval process and publishing research deemed state secrets could mean years behind bars.
The fact that you and I — and the entire international community — can access this quantum paper probably means that the authors had already gotten the go-ahead from above, which would mean that the finding, at least in their bosses’ eye, wasn’t as much a breakthrough as some Western observers may think.
Make no mistake. Chinese scientists could still beat their American counterpart to the quantum Holy Grail and start cracking passwords all over the internet; we just wouldn’t hear about it in the news right away. So, it would be misguided to take comfort in this temporary reprieve. It remains a top priority for the U.S. and Western allies to advance research in quantum-resistant encryption technologies before it’s too late.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.