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Here’s the paper no one read before declaring the demise of modern cryptography

The advance was incremental at best. So why did so many think it was a breakthrough?

Last year’s hype train, mentioned earlier in this article, was touched off by coverage by the same publication that claimed researchers found a factorization method that could break a 2,048-bit RSA key using a quantum system with just 372 qubits. The coverage of the September paper is especially overblown because symmetric encryption, unlike RSA and other asymmetric siblings, is are widely belived to be safe from quantum computing, as long as bit sizes are sufficient. Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords.

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