Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have concluded.

A public key cryptography method that provides fast decryption and digital signature processing. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) uses points on an elliptic curve to derive a 163-bit public key that is equivalent in strength to a 1024-bit RSA key.