Researchers say this breakthrough poses a “real and serious threat” to password protection mechanisms that have long been employed in critical sectors such as banking and the military.
Although general-purpose quantum computing has made slow progress and currently poses no threat to modern cryptography, scientists have been researching a variety of attack approaches against specialized quantum computers.
In the latest study, led by Wang Chao from Shanghai University, a team announced that they were able to break through a cryptographic algorithm using a quantum computer built by Canada’s D-Wave Systems.
They leveraged D-Wave Advantage to successfully attack Present, Gift-64, and Rectangle algorithms. All of these represent the SPN (Substitution Permutation Network) structure, which forms part of the foundation of the world’s widely used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). military and finance.
For example, AES-256 is considered the best encryption available and is also referred to as military-grade encryption.
