One of the most well-established and disruptive uses for a future quantum computer is the ability to crack encryption. A new algorithm could significantly lower the barrier to achieving this. Despite ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

No quantum computer today is powerful enough to actually run Shor’s algorithm for code-breaking. Experts estimate it would take 20 million quantum processing units, called qubits, to do it. The ...