Originally posted by minesweeper
>>Has anyone read "Net Force: Night Moves" by Tom Clancy? One of the key objects in that book is a quantum computer that hacks this isanely strong encryption on some nukes.<<

Haven't read it but I have heard that even if a quantum computer was developed it wouldn't be let out for just anyone to play with. You could probably find your way through any encryption with that sort of power.
Wow, that's scary. Think about this. These sort of awesome computers will probably be restricted by the government (I'm in the U.S. here in case ur wondering). So, that probably means that these computers will only be available to the gov't and its defense program and maybe some universities for research. That would mean that the only people with such powerful computers are academic types and John Ashcoft/Donald Rumsfield types of people. Doesn't anyone else find that extremely scary?

However, I imagine that as processor speed increase, so would encryption systems. I wonder in Public Key ciphers could stand up to these new quantum computers. Public Key cryptography works on the principle that one can't factor the product of two primes by any easy method; one would simply have to construct some nested loops to try to match the key, so Public Keys use very large (hundreds of digits) prime numbers assuming that no computer could factor those enormous numbers in any reasonable amount of time. But if a computer could, Public Key encryption would be useless. I wonder what cryptographers would think up next to combat this problem . . .