A single core PC has broken through an algorithm for quantum computers

About a month ago, we told you that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended standardizing four cryptographic algorithms that future quantum computers, incredibly more powerful than the current ones, would not be able to hack. Apparently, one of them was not exactly safe, as a PC equipped with a single core CPU was able to hack it in under an hour.

Specifically, we are talking about the SIKE algorithm (Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation), which was defeated by violating its mathematical basis of cryptography, SIDH (Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman), found to be vulnerable to the "glue-and-split" theorem, developed by mathematician Ernst Kani in 1997 and which can rely on additional math tools from 2000.




It is only a matter of time before quantum computers are able to have the power to violate the current cryptographic algorithms that are securing huge amounts of data, also, and above all, important and confidential. Precisely for this reason, it is essential to design efficient algorithms that are proof against "quantum attacks" right now.