ECDSA point addition circuits optimized for Shor's algorithm by humans and AI
ECDSA.Fail: Open Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor's Algorithm
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Breaking certain kinds of encryption, like those used for securing Bitcoin, needs a lot of quantum computing power. The authors created a public system where humans and AI work together to find better ways to do a key math step called elliptic-curve point addition. Their improvements make the quantum computations much more efficient, using fewer resources overall. This progress helps understand how quantum computers might one day challenge current encryption methods.
What this means in practice
- •For quantum hardware developers: Design quantum processors with optimized circuits for elliptic curve operations to reduce resource demands in cryptanalysis tasks.
- •For quantum algorithm engineers: Implement improved elliptic-curve point addition circuits to advance quantum cryptanalysis implementations within Shor's algorithm frameworks.
Authors
Jieyi Long, Theodore Pender, Zhao Huang, Manuel B. Santos, Samrendra Kumar Singh, Bartosz Naskręcki, Bit Wonka, Joe Doyle, Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, Francesco Giannicola, Ruben M. L. Paschoarelli, Oli Freuler, Jackie Chia-Hsun Lee, Vasily Gnuchev, Gopi Kannappan, John Boyer, Xavier Butler, Akash Balasubramani, Jordan Newman, Bereket Dereje, Alexander Hertlein, Robert Kodra, Lucas Levy, Shaan Patel, JT Rose, Matt Zweil, Okechukwu Wisdom, Tarek El-Eter, Edison Lee, Michael Dong, Alan Li, Anto Joseph, Gajesh Naik, Gautham Anant, Soubhik Deb, Justin Drake
Abstract
We propose Open Autoresearch, a paradigm in which humans and AI agents publish evaluator-verified improvements to a public leaderboard. We instantiate it in ECDSA.Fail, optimizing reversible secp256k1 point-addition circuits, a bottleneck in Shor's algorithm for elliptic-curve cryptography. The benchmark minimizes the spacetime-inspired score $S=Q\times T$, where $Q$ is peak logical qubit width and $T$ is average executed Toffoli count. Participants reduced $S$ by 86.1%. At the data cutoff (26 July 2026), the best-scoring circuit uses 1,151 qubits and 1,299,453 average executed Toffoli gates, giving $Q\times T\approx1.496$ billion. This is more than 50% below Google's published point-addition score thresholds (arXiv:2603.28846), under different accounting conventions. Because the benchmark supplies one addend classically, we construct a coherent windowed-addition-compatible variant implementing the single-call interface required by windowed Shor. It uses 1,162 qubits and 1,684,161 average executed Toffoli gates. On 100,000 random inputs, its empirical success probability is $\hat{p}=0.99809$, giving $Q\times T/\hat{p}\approx1.961$ billion under an independently rerunnable per-call sensitivity model, not a full-Shor success estimate. Its qubit and Toffoli counts lie below Google's published thresholds and Schrottenloher's reported operating points (arXiv:2606.02235), although differing interfaces, accounting conventions, and validation scope preclude formal dominance. After the cutoff, the score was further reduced to 1.259 billion, while a separate low-width circuit reached 813 qubits. The public record shows AI agents complementing human judgment, providing evidence for open autoresearch on efficiently evaluable, machine-checkable objectives.