Leveraging the power of quantum computing for breaking RSA encryption

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. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.