A quantum computer is a machine designed to use quantum mechanics to do things which cannot be done by any machine based only on the laws of classical physics. Eventual applications of quantum ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

MIT’s Peter Shor explains why he devised an algorithm for a quantum computer that could unravel our online data encryption Internet security relies on the fact that our computers can’t break its ...

NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has formally removed Dual_EC_DRBG from its draft guidance on random number generators. This is ...