What makes encryption so safe isn’t that it can’t be cracked, all encryption can be cracked, its the sheer amount of time and effort it would require to do so. Even with a powerful supercomputer, it could take years to crack a single, high-end encryption. This is something that the NSA hopes to change by building a quantum supercomputer that could, in theory, quickly crack nearly any encryption out there.
The U.S. National Security Agency is attempting to build a new breed of supercomputer that theoretically could make short work of cracking most keys used for encrypted communications. The project to build “a cryptographically useful quantum computer” is part of an $80 million research project called “Penetrating Hard Targets” that is taking place at a campus in College Park, Maryland, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper quoted documents it said were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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