WaPo - NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption

In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled, “Penetrating Hard Targets.”

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if they already had it.  And if they do I just have to laugh at all the people I know who have sworn by their various encryption schemes all these years.  Ha! I say. Ha! Ha!

What is more interesting to me is a statement further down in the article;

A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.

In 2009, computer scientists using classical methods were able to discover the primes within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of computers to factor it. The scientists estimated that it would take 1,000 times longer to break a 1,024-bit encryption key, which is commonly used for online transactions.

Two years and hundreds of computers in 2009 but what do we have now?  GPU computing, computers with multiple video cards, and bitcoin mining, where the proof of work is large prime numbers suitable for cryptographic use.   I wonder who might be interested in a setup like that.  The NSA maybe?

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