Chinese scientists say they have cracked a common encryption method, local media reports.
It is used in banking and the military.
They used a quantum computer to crack it.
Chinese scientists have cracked cryptographic algorithms using a quantum computer, SCMP reported, citing researchers from Shanghai University.
The scientists say they have carried out the world’s first effective attack on a widely used encryption method. They added that “this breakthrough poses a real and significant threat” to the long-standing password protection mechanism used in critical sectors, including banking and the military.
The team of researchers said they used a quantum computer made by Canadian company D-Wave Systems to successfully crack cryptographic algorithms.
“Using D-Wave Advantage, they successfully attacked the Present, Gift-64, and Rectangle algorithms — all of which are a Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) structure, which is part of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) framework, which is widely used in the military and financial [cryptocurrency] spheres,” the report said.
In addition, the SCMP noted that AES-256 is considered the best of the existing ciphers and is often called a military-grade cipher.
Earlier, analysts at Coin Metrics calculated that attackers would need about $20 billion to carry out a so-called 51% attack on the Bitcoin blockchain. A similar attack on the Ethereum network would require more than $34 billion.
In March 2024, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about the threat of an attack on the blockchain using quantum computing. According to him, the network can be made resistant to this threat “tomorrow.” https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/670cd796a061612952421dfa/
