The end of public key cryptography as we know it?

[Doug Hughes <Doug.Hughes@Eng.Auburn.EDU>]

An article posted on sci.crypt stated that quantum factoring
is real and that an article was posted in this month's Science
magazine. The author of the post says this would make factoring
a 10 bit number the same time as factoring a 100000000 bit number.

A wonder how long it is before every major government in the world
has one of these. Makes RSA's future kind of moot doesn't it??

I definitely have to read this article, but I thought I'd post it
here for those that weren't aware or that hadn't heard.

I wonder how long it will take before they can figure out how to
do this for other computationally intensinve problems like N-th roots.
(To make Diffie Hellman moot as well).

It's beginning to seem that mathematically challenging algorithms
aren't going to be that challenging for long.  I have no details other
than what is posted here.

Perhaps somebody could post a better synopsis than what was in
sci.crypt? (I plan on reading it for myself anyway, which I imagine
most other people here will be doing as soon as they can)

 Doug Hughes				Engineering Network Services
 doug@eng.auburn.edu			Auburn University