NIST unveils four ‘quantum-proof’ cryptography algorithms

> It took over 350 years to crack Fermats last theorem. These are the timescales at which we solve hard math problems

By “crack” they mean, prove the theorem holds. They make it sound like somebody hacked into Fermat’s last theorem and found an exploit which broke a bunch of cryptography, that’s not true. (Unlike Fermat’s little theorem, which underpins RSA, Fermat’s last theorem has no relevance to crypto AFIK).

I know very little about quantum computing but my understanding is that it will just be a much more powerful computer and therefore all the current key sizes that we use for cryptography will be rendered vulnerable to brute force attacks. Maybe these algorithms just find a practical ways of increasing the key size?

It sounds like the assumption is quantum computers will actually solve some fundamental things in number theory we don’t know how to do e.g. find an efficient algorithm for prime factorisation…