Quantum computing can hack more than 1,000 ETH wallets in days

A quantum attacker could potentially steal funds from a transaction while it is still waiting to be processed.

Google’s quantum computing team has published a white paper detailing how a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could crack the private keys of the richest 1,000 Ethereum wallets in less than 9 days, directly putting more than 20 million ETH at risk.

In addition, the paper presented a timeline that the researchers say no longer allows room for complacency.

What Google research found

To understand the risks, it helps to know how crypto wallets remain safe today. Each wallet has a private key, a secret password of some kind, and a public address that others can see. The security system currently used by Ethereum makes it essentially impossible to work backwards from the public address to the private key. Once quantum computers are powerful enough, they will break this barrier completely.

According to a Google research paper, Ethereum is exhibition In five separate levels. The most immediate threat is individual wallets: the top 1,000 wallets alone hold about 20.5 million Ethereum. But smart contracts, the self-executing programs that power most of Ethereum’s financial activities, are also at risk. Their administrator keys control nearly $200 billion worth of stablecoins and other real-world assets.

Furthermore, the validators who keep the Ethereum network running have 37 million ETH in invested funds, and the systems that support Ethereum’s layer 2 networks each hold exposure worth about 15 million ETH.

The danger is not limited to the theoretical aspect only, as Google estimates that a fast quantum computer can hack the private key of a single wallet in about nine minutes. Putting this in the context of Bitcoin would show just how serious the situation is, especially if you remember that a new Bitcoin block is confirmed roughly every ten minutes. This means that a quantum attacker could potentially steal funds from a transaction waiting to be processed before it can be removed. Cryptography research group Project Eleven described This was a “mempool attack,” something the cryptocurrency community had previously assumed was far-fetched.

The warning may come too late

Google’s paper specifies the qubit requirements for this attack as either 1,200 logical qubits and 90 million calculations or 1,450 logical qubits and 70 million operations, depending on the architecture. According to Project Eleven, this is a 10-fold improvement over previously published estimates.

You may also like:

Interestingly, on the same day that Google released its findings, researchers from Oratomi, Caltech, and UC Berkeley published separate work showing that Shor’s algorithm could work at cryptographic-relevant scales with at least 10,000 reconfigurable atomic arms, with ECC-256 potentially falling in five days on a 22,000-qubit machine.

However, opinions are divided on how close the threat actually is. Some analysts have Argue The risk is still at least a decade away, and will hit the broader internet infrastructure first, giving markets time to react. But others are already starting to get things moving, with Google, for example, session A deadline of 2029 to upgrade its own systems, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, recently announced published A roadmap to quantum resilience for the network, showing how its security systems can be replaced by systems that quantum computers cannot break.