Project Eleven just awarded 1 BTC for "the largest quantum attack on ECC to date", a 17-bit elliptic curve key recovered on IBM Quantum hardware. I replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key.
A 17-bit key is trivial classically, a laptop cracks it in microseconds. That's not the point. The claim is that a quantum computer did it, using Shor
For Shor to actually be working, the quantum computer's output has to be different from random. It's supposed to produce peaks in a specific distribution that encode the secret key. Pure noise shouldn't work.
I forked the winning repo, removed the calls to IBM quantum, and replace it with random bytes from /dev/urandom. Everything else was kept exactly the same.
I ran the author's own CLI unmodified against every challenge he claimed to have solved.
Every recovered key is byte-identical to what the author reports from IBM hardware.
Why does this happen? The author's pipeline accepts any(j, k, r)triple whose d_cand = (r − j)·k⁻¹ mod n passes d·G == Q. With enough random guesses, one always will.
From the original README "When shots >> n, random noise alone can recover d with high probability."
Yes. And every small-bit run has shots/n between 1.9× and 1,170×.
The flagship 17-bit run used 20,000 shots against n = 65,173. Theoretical chance that uniform random recovers the key: 1 - (1 − 1/n)^S ≈ 26%. Empirical: 2 of 5 attempts = 40%. The QPU got 1 of 1, which is a ~p=0.26 coin flip.
The QPU contributed nothing. Its output is statistically indistinguishable from noise for the purposes of this pipeline. Replacing it with entropy bytes gives the same answers.
The brief itself admits it: "At 17-bit, the estimated circuit fidelity is 0.995^111,816 ≈ 10⁻²⁴⁴. Every shot produces a unique bitstring ... The output appears indistinguishable from uniform noise - yet the correct key is recovered." Yeah, because the "recovery" is a classical verifier, not a quantum computation.
This is not progress on quantum cryptanalysis. It's a classical brute-force search with an expensive random number generator bolted on.
I thought this From Yuval Adam on X was interesting:
https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum/pull/1