Qutrits Bring Quantum Computers Closer

KentuckyFC writes "To do anything useful with quantum logic gates, you need dozens to hundreds of them, all joined together. And because of various errors and problems that creep in, that's more or less impossible with today's technology. Now an Australian group has built and tested logic gates that convert qubits into qutrits (three-level quantum states) before processing and then convert them back again. That makes them far more powerful. The group says that a quantum computer that might require 50 conventional quantum logic gates can now be built with just 9 of the new gates. What's more, the gates process photons using nothing more than standard linear optical components (abstract on the physics arxiv)."

Re:Personal cryptography users should be disappoin

[TheRealMindChild]

Yes and no. I mean, the problem that you point out is only exists because a quantum computer is cracking an encryption that had to run in reasonable time on today's computers. But quantum computers don't have to be just one way like that... now you would have at your disposal a computer that can run encryption that would take thousands or millions of years on todays machines, on your data.

Re:Personal cryptography users should be disappoin

[Cheeko]

Somewhat. Private key schemes are still secure.

The real power of quantum computing will be in factoring primes. Which most certainly will affect public key crypto, but public key was never the FULL solution. Like anything in crypto different problems have different solutions.

Public key crypto is great in the web age because you can use it for establishing connections, exchanging private keys, etc.

One of the first things you learn in any crypto grad class is that creating the crypto schemes is only part of the problem. Creating the usage scheme is the other. Most man in the middle and other such attacks can defeat the algorithms by which we use crypto far easier than we can defeat the encryption itself. (or just social engineer your way past it)

While it does suck a bit that the heyday of public key crypto might come to an end because of quantum computing, some other scheme will take its place. Perhaps someone will come up with a key gen scheme that doesn't rely on the difficulty of factoring large primes and instead some other mathematical relationship that quantum computing won't be able to stop.

Perhaps the optimal solution will be a mix. Perhaps each public key will in fact be 2 operations. One large prime factor to defeat traditional systems, combined with some as yet created scheme that stops quantum systems (but may be easy to beat on a tradition system).

As with all things, crypto will adapt. Perhaps one day we'll figure out a way using quantum mechanics to create true OTP encryption. Maybe 2 entangled particles or something (I know technically this is impossible, but just making the point maybe there's something we don't know yet that will help us in the future implement todays theoretically impossible/infeasible crypto)