Podcast | 22,000 Qubits to Crack RSA – with Théau Peronnin of Alice & Bob

Forget needing millions of qubits to break the internet. According to a bombshell new quantum computing paper from Alice & Bob, factoring RSA-2048 could soon take just 22,593 physical cat qubits and 3.14 days. Even more concerning for cryptocurrency holders, a similarly sized quantum machine could crack Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography in a mere 60 minutes, putting millions of exposed addresses (including Satoshi Nakamoto’s untouched stash) at immediate risk. CEO and co-founder Théau Peronnin returns to join host Konstantinos Karagiannis and unpack how his team slashed their previous qubit estimates by more than 15x, moving beyond theoretical back-of-the-envelope math to map out every single gate across the entire compilation chain.

Théau pulls back the curtain on the hardware milestones and tough trade-offs required to make this compact architecture a reality, including pushing cat qubit bit-flip resilience to a full century and keeping systems calibrated against passing streetcars over multi-day runs. We also dive into how autonomous AI experimentalists are now running live physics tests inside Alice & Bob’s labs, why the window for Q-Day is rapidly narrowing, and why upgrading software won't save organizations that leave vulnerable IoT hardware nodes exposed.

For more on Alice & Bob, visit https://alice-bob.com/.

Visit Protiviti at https://www.protiviti.com/us-en/quantum-computing-services to learn more about how Protiviti is helping organizations get post-quantum ready.