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IonQ researchers priced an attack on secp256k1, the curve Bitcoin and Ethereum use for signatures, for a machine the company has not built, assuming two-qubit gate errors of 1 in 10,000 over a run of nearly four weeks.
Eric Lu posted a 130-digit prime factor of the 260-digit challenge number. The other factor is also prime. Lu later described a GPU run of the number field sieve that took about 4,900 GPU-days and cost about $400,000.
EMVCo's Security Working Group puts a code-breaking quantum computer at least two decades away and sets no migration date for chip cards. The authors built their timeline on three qubit counts, one of which IBM gives in logical qubits.
StarkWare spent 10,000 satoshis from a lock built on hash-based signatures, in a Bitcoin transaction mined by MARA Pool. A flaw in the original script, which left one of two signature rounds unenforced, was fixed on October 7.
The insurer's researchers put the code-breaking machine at roughly 1,250–1,450 logical qubits, against 4,700–7,500 for leading financial applications. The Google researchers they listed as a source reported fewer than 1,200 at one trade-off point.
The circuit needs fewer logical qubits than any estimate its authors compared but, in its latest version, 24 to 27 times the Toffoli gates of two earlier low-qubit designs. The authors did not estimate physical qubits or running time.
A passive copy of encrypted traffic taken from a cable, radio link, or satellite beam leaves nothing on the victim's network. Tools marketed against harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks watch for exfiltration, anomalous traffic, or quantum-vulnerable encryption instead.
Bernstein ran both demonstrations on his own implementation after adding each bug himself. He based his case against deploying ML-DSA alone on a statistical model of how many severe bugs new libraries will ship.
André Schrottenloher released circuits and code for the step repeated 28 times in an attack on Bitcoin's signature curve. Craig Gidney, a Google Quantum AI co-author of the March study, wrote that such work should be published openly.
Researchers have fit Shor's algorithm into 9,739 neutral-atom physical qubits, with elliptic-curve runs that lengthen from 10 days to about 1,000 as the count falls. The authors assumed error rates and clock speeds no machine has shown together.
