The Ultimate Hack: Crack your Credit Card with Quantum Programming

Dive into RSA cryptography and the Shor’s algorithm with Qiskit

As we go about our daily lives, swiping or tapping our credit cards has become a routine part of making purchases. You just tap and… hey presto, you have completed the transaction. But have you ever stopped to consider the technology that enables these transactions to take place? Actually, there’s a surprising amount of technology and infrastructure working together behind the scenes to ensure that every transaction is secure and seamless.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the encryption behind credit card transactions and explore the potential impact of quantum computing on this fundamental aspect of our financial lives. As a proof of concept, we implement a general circuit for the Shor’s algorithm with QISKit and show how it can break the encryption behind our credit cards, by factoring primes up to 4087.

Github repository: https://github.com/Aurelien-Pelissier/Medium.

EMV credit cards and RSA Cryptography

EMV stands for Europay, Mastercard and Visa, the three organizations that created the original chip-card specification that was unveiled in 1996. EMV smart cards were deployed to combat…