According to the report of the Financial Times on January 5, many computer security experts are trying to evaluate a surprising statement made by Chinese researchers this week that they have found a way to use the current generation of quantum computers to crack the most common forms of online encryption.

Recently, Chinese researchers such as Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University published papers on the preprint platform arxiv, reporting that the number of quantum bits required to crack the 2048 bit RSA key can be greatly reduced, and existing quantum computers can do so. According to the statement of the paper, this method was outlined in a scientific paper published in late December and can be used to crack the RSA algorithm that supports most online encryption.

IBM has indicated that its 433 qubit Osprey system is the most powerful quantum computer that has been publicly unveiled and will be provided to its customers early this year.

Roger Grimes, a computer security expert and author, said that if correct, the study would mark an important moment in the history of computer security.

"This is a huge breakthrough," he said. "It means that the government can crack the secrets of other governments. If this is true - a big assumption - it will be a secret in the film and one of the greatest things in the history of computer science."

Other experts said that although the theory outlined in the research paper seems reasonable, attempting to apply it to practice may be far beyond the capabilities of today's quantum technology.

"As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with this paper," said Peter Shor, a scientist at MIT. His algorithm in 1994 proved that quantum machines can beat online encryption, which helped trigger a research boom in quantum computing. Shor's method requires a machine with hundreds of thousands or even millions of quantum bits, which many experts believe will take ten years or more to achieve.

However, Shor added that Chinese researchers "failed to solve the running speed of the algorithm" and said it may "still take many years". "I suspect the most likely scenario is that it hasn't improved much," he said

As early as the 1990s, Peter Shor found that it is easy to factorize large numbers with a quantum computer, but the number of quantum bits required is up to millions, and the existing technology cannot produce a quantum computer of this scale. Today's most advanced quantum computers have only hundreds of qubits - for example, IBM's Osprey has 433 qubits. Chinese researchers have proposed an optimization method to reduce the number of quantum bits required to 372, which is possible with existing technology, although there is no such advanced quantum computer in China. Bruce Schneier, a well-known encryption expert, pointed out on his blog that the optimization method proposed by Chinese researchers was based on a controversial paper recently published by Peter Schnorr. Schnorr's algorithm collapsed on a larger system, so it is unknown whether the Chinese method is successful.

The latest research paper claims to fill the gap in Schnorr's research by using quantum computers to speed up some of the calculations that he cannot solve. It emphasizes the use of hybrid technologies that combine quantum systems and classical systems, which is the focus of most of the work currently under way, and which is looking for practical uses of quantum machines.

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert, said that the paper did not solve the problem of whether the technology could play a role in practice.

Schneier said that even if the research statement was proved to be infeasible, it also highlighted a race to find a way to crack encryption using quantum computers, which was much earlier than many people expected: "Many people are betting that breaking RSA will not work. But one day, this bet will be wrong."