A startup tackling post-quantum security, Project Ele Eleeleven, labeled the incident as "the largest quantum attack on cryptography ever." Project Ele AMeleven awarded Lelli the Q‑Day Prize of 1 BTC. Representatives from the startup revealed that Lelli extracted the private key from a public search space of 32,767 options, using a variant of Shor's algorithm, which helps solve discrete logarithm problems on elliptic curves (ECDLP).
Last September, engineer Steve Tippeconnic hacked a six-bit elliptic curve key on IBM's 133-qubit quantum computer. According to Project AMeleven, this was the first public demonstration of such a hack on quantum hardware. However, Lelli's result surpasses Tippeconnic's achievement by 512 times. Despite this, the resulting hack is still far from breaching Bitcoin: the blockchain of the first cryptocurrency employs 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography to secure wallets.
"The gap from 15 bits to 256 bits is significant, but this divide is increasingly viewed as an engineering challenge rather than a fundamental physics issue. Lelli's demonstration highlights the urgent need to transition to post-quantum cryptography," announced Project AMeleven.#BTC #crypto #Write2Earn $NOM $NEWT
