Given the impact and implications this would have:
- How would anyone even go about publishing anything like this without literally breaking the world?
- Would this actually break the world?
- What if they were malicious? Could something like this sneak under the radar and escape to the dark web to be exploited by criminals?
- What if they were not malicious, but had non-scientific (cough) monetary, goals in mind, would there even be a way to somehow milk this?
- What if they were a scientist, purest of heart, how would they go about this?
- Wouldn't this have to be done anonymously for personal security reasons?
Watching the humanity over the past few years has been.. illuminating. I am not sure we are even remotely close to being set up to handle something like this.
What do you think?
There is a fast quantum factorization method, Shor's Algorithm. As far as we know, it is not yet practical. However, there is ongoing work on post-quantum cryptography that would be safe against such attacks.
The most likely users for a fast factorization algorithm that could break RSA encryption are nation-states. They would obviously keep this capability secret.
Nation-states have compromised many systems anyway, without needing to break this kind of cryptography. We are not really set up to handle this either.
... but answering your questions would make a great techno-thriller story.