Leveraging the power of quantum computing for breaking RSA encryption

ABSTRACT

Encryption is the process of securing confidential data that bars a third party’s access to the information.RSA encryption utilises the property of complexity classes wherein the problem of prime integer factorization lies inside the Non-Polynomial time (NP-Hard) class, which makes it impervious to classical computers. Since it is so hard to break even for a computer, it becomes important to do encryption for all the secure transactions. Although it lies outside the capabilities of traditional computing, the recent developments in the field of quantum computing can be utilised to break RSA Encryption. The approach involves mapping of qubits used in a quantum machine to a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and then using them to check for factors. This consists of the use of a Multiplicative Boolean circuit in which the qubits utilised by the machine replaces the variables. These Qubits are then mapped as per the gates involved, and the factorization problem is thus transformed into a CSP problem, through which, the factors can be easily found. Once known, these factors can be used to calculate the public and private keys effectively breaking the encryption security. We provide a novel approach to highlight the importance of developing Post-Quantum cryptography techniques for providing a secure channel of communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Quantum computer
• qubit
• superposition
• probability
• public key cryptography
• RSA cryptosystem
• computer Security
• shor’s algorithm
• factorisation
• CSP (Constraint Satisfaction Problem)

Acknowledgments

We would like to show our gratitude to Dr. Vikas Chaudhary, Professor, JIMS Engineering Management Technical Campus, and Dr. R.S. Bhatia, Professor, National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra for assistance with methodology and also for valuable comments for paper writing that greatly improved the manuscript.

Compliance with ethical standards

1)Conflict of Interest: The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest.

2) Research involving human participants and animals: This article does not contain any studies

with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

3) Informed consent: This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Therefore, obtaining informed consent does not apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

There is no funding from any government or private bodies.