A Stroll Through Encryption and Quantum Stuff
Posted on April 21st, 2025
Recently, I watched a video explaining how a quantum computer could theoretically significantly speed up the process of breaking RSA cryptography. That left me with some lingering questions: first of all, why do we encrypt things? How does RSA work? What does it have to do with prime numbers? How does a quantum computer actually work? And so on. Unfortunately, we won’t answer all of these questions right now, but I’ll do my best to explore most of them.
In the spirit of “starting from the beginning”, let’s say you want to send a message to a friend, but you don’t want anyone else to read it. You can’t guarantee the message won’t be intercepted, so you and your friend come up with a cipher — basically, a way to scramble the message so that, if intercepted, it appears as gibberish and the original content remains protected.
