Military Grade Cryptography Cracked? No!

There’s a big difference between someone hacking something, and someone cracking something

Don’t you just love cybersecurity when you wake up to see that something you thought was ultra-secure, perhaps is not [here]:

I am sorry to say, that this is just click-bate!

The main reason that there is unlikely to be a major advancement on breaking cryptography, is the number of limited number of qubits in we can used at the current time. Peter Shor outlined a method that could break our existing discrete log and integer factorisation problems and thus showed that RSA and ECC could be broken with enough qubits. Luv Grover then showed that it should be possible to build a massive table of symmetric keys and then try each of these at the same time.

Overall, it is a rather strange article. It initially starts to talk about the breaking of symmetric key methods and then moves onto RSA cracking. It outlines that the quantum device has been used as an attack on the SPN (Substitution-Permutation Network) part of a symmetric key methods. Overall an SPN is used in many symmetric key methods, including AES. This includes a substitution box (s-box [here]) and which takes byte values and then changes them to another value. After this, we then permutate the bits within a pLayer [here]:

The S-box is basically a lookup table for the bytes as they are scrambled, and the permutation layer then scrambles the bits in a certain way. When we decrypt, we just reverse these operations. The breaking of the SPN is only one part of the breaking symmetric key methods, and where we are still a long way off actually breaking the underlying methods.

RSA Cracking

The article then goes on to mention how this paper advances the cracking of RSA using the D-Wave advantage: [here]: