Assessing the Benefits and Risks of Quantum Computers
arxiv(2024)
摘要
Quantum computing is an emerging technology with potentially far-reaching
implications for national prosperity and security. Understanding the timeframes
over which economic benefits and national security risks may manifest
themselves is vital for ensuring the prudent development of this technology. To
inform security experts and policy decision makers on this matter, we review
what is currently known on the potential uses and risks of quantum computers,
leveraging current research literature.
The maturity of currently-available quantum computers is not yet at a level
such that they can be used in production for large-scale, industrially-relevant
problems, but they are not believed to currently pose security risks. We
identify 2 large-scale trends – new approximate methods (variational
algorithms, error mitigation, and circuit knitting) and the commercial
exploration of business-relevant quantum applications – which, together, may
enable useful and practical quantum computing in the near future.
Crucially, these methods do not appear likely to change the required
resources for cryptanalysis on currently-used cryptosystems. From an analysis
we perform of the current and known algorithms for cryptanalysis, we find they
require circuits of a size exceeding those that can be run by current and
near-future quantum computers (and which will require error correction), though
we acknowledge improvements in quantum algorithms for these problems are taking
place in the literature. In addition, the risk to cybersecurity can be
well-managed by the migration to new, quantum-safe cryptographic protocols,
which we survey and discuss.
Given the above, we conclude there is a credible expectation that quantum
computers will be capable of performing computations which are
economically-impactful before they will be capable of performing ones which are
cryptographically-relevant.
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