Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently ...

Three weeks ago, panic swept across some corners of the security world after researchers discovered a breakthrough that, at long last, put the cracking of the widely used RSA encryption scheme within ...

Nature talks to Peter Shor 25 years after he showed how to make quantum computations feasible — and how they could endanger our data. When physicists first thought up quantum computers in the 1980s, ...

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 ...

Somewhere on a blockchain right now, a Bitcoin address that last moved coins in 2015 is sitting with its public key fully exposed, waiting for its owner to return. That owner may have years to act, or ...

Quantum factor: the Paul trap used by Monz and colleagues. (Courtesy: C Lackner/Quantum Optics and Spectroscopy Group, University of Innsbruck) A quantum computer made of five trapped ions has been ...

Part 1 of this series explained what quantum computers actually are. Not just faster versions of regular computers, but a fundamentally different kind of machine that exploits the weird rules of ...

When the Robert Redford film Sneakers hit theaters in 1992, most moviegoers had never heard of the Internet. They’d have guessed “World Wide Web” was a horror film involving spiders. And nobody knew ...