The encryption protecting communications against criminal and nation-state snooping is under threat. As private industry and governments get closer to building useful quantum computers, the algorithms protecting Bitcoin wallets, encrypted web visits, and other sensitive secrets will be useless. No one doubts the day will come, but as the now-common joke in cryptography circles observes, experts have been forecasting this cryptocalypse will arrive in the next 15 to 30 years for the past 30 years.
The uncertainty has created something of an existential dilemma: Should network architects spend the billions of dollars required to wean themselves off quantum-vulnerable algorithms now, or should they prioritize their limited security budgets fighting more immediate threats such as ransomware and espionage attacks? Given the expense and no clear deadline, it’s little wonder that less than half of all TLS connections made inside the Cloudflare network and only 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant TLS connections. It’s all but certain that many fewer organizations still are supporting quantum-ready encryption in less prominent protocols. — Read More
Tag Archives: Quantum
IBM Venture Head Says Company Puts Quantum on Equal Footing With AI
IBM Ventures is treating quantum computing as strategically important as artificial intelligence, targeting startups to build ecosystems that complement its hardware roadmap, according to Global Venturing.
The unit has invested in companies such as Qedma, QunaSys, and Strangeworks while expanding partnerships with universities like the University of Chicago to accelerate commercialization of quantum technologies.
Alongside quantum, IBM Ventures continues to prioritize enterprise-focused AI investments, emphasizing domain-specific tools, automation software, and multi-model strategies. — Read More
IBM now describing its first error-resistant quantum compute system
On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model using classical computing methods. The hardware, which will be called Starling, is expected to be able to perform 100 million operations without error on a collection of 200 logical qubits. And the company expects to have it available for use in 2029.
Perhaps just as significant, IBM is also committing to a detailed description of the intermediate steps to Starling. These include a number of processors that will be configured to host a collection of error-corrected qubits, essentially forming a functional compute unit. This marks a major transition for the company, as it involves moving away from talking about collections of individual hardware qubits and focusing instead on units of functional computational hardware. If all goes well, it should be possible to build Starling by chaining a sufficient number of these compute units together.
“We’re updating [our roadmap] now with a series of deliverables that are very precise,” IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars, “because we feel that we’ve now answered basically all the science questions associated with error correction and it’s becoming more of a path towards an engineering problem.” — Read More
Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chip
Microsoft believes it has made a key breakthrough in quantum computing, unlocking the potential for quantum computers to solve industrial-scale problems. The software giant has spent 17 years working on a research project to create a new material and architecture for quantum computing, and it’s unveiling the Majorana 1 processor, Microsoft’s first quantum processor based on this new architecture.
… Majorana 1 can potentially fit a million qubits onto a single chip that’s not much bigger than the CPUs inside desktop PCs and servers. — Read More
Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor
Shor’s algorithm has seriously challenged information security based on public key cryptosystems. However, to break the widely used RSA-2048 scheme, one needs millions of physical qubits, which is far beyond current technical capabilities. Here, we report a universal quantum algorithm for integer factorization by combining the classical lattice reduction with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). The number of qubits required is O(logN/loglogN), which is sublinear in the bit length of the integer N, making it the most qubit-saving factorization algorithm to date. We demonstrate the algorithm experimentally by factoring integers up to 48 bits with 10 superconducting qubits, the largest integer factored on a quantum device. We estimate that a quantum circuit with 372 physical qubits and a depth of thousands is necessary to challenge RSA-2048 using our algorithm. Our study shows great promise in expediting the application of current noisy quantum computers, and paves the way to factor large integers of realistic cryptographic significance. Read More
#cyber, #quantumWill quantum computing kill Crypto?
Many claim quantum computing threats the existence of Crypto, but does it really?
“Blockchain is useless because it is going to be killed by quantum computers anyway.”
You’ve probably heard this many times.
If that statement was to be true, quantum computing can also have the potential to kill the entire Internet security infrastructure.
Indeed, certain aspects of blockchains, the Internet, and cryptography, are highly quantum unsafe, making quantum computers a very dangerous hazard for your portfolio if not taken into account at the right time.
But, to what extent are our Crypto investments in danger? Read More
#blockchain, #quantum
What are quantum-resistant algorithms—and why do we need them?
When quantum computers become powerful enough, they could theoretically crack the encryption algorithms that keep us safe. The race is on to find new ones.
Cryptographic algorithms are what keep us safe online, protecting our privacy and securing the transfer of information.
But many experts fear that quantum computers could one day break these algorithms, leaving us open to attack from hackers and fraudsters. And those quantum computers may be ready sooner than many people think.
That’s why there is serious work underway to design new types of algorithms that are resistant to even the most powerful quantum computer we can imagine. Read More
Xanadu Launches Borealis, a 216 Squeezed-state Quibit Photonic Processor
Xanadu, a Toronto based quantum computing startup, has released their Borealis processor and has made it available on the Xanadu Cloud. They will also make it available soon on the Amazon Braket cloud service. In addition, Xanadu has demonstrated Quantum Supremacy with this device by running a Random Number Sampling experiment on it use Gaussian Boson Sampling. This demonstration is similar to those performed by Google in October 2019 with their superconducting based device and also by the University of Science and Technology China (USTC) with their Gaussian Boson Sampler in December of 2020. Read More
Meet the NSA spies shaping the future
For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States.
Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate, like the rest of the NSA, has a dual mission: secure American systems and spy on the rest of the world. The budget is classified, a secret among secrets, but the NSA is one of the world’s largest spy agencies by any measure and Herrera’s directorate is the entire US intelligence community’s biggest in-house research and development arm. The directorate must come up with solutions to problems that are not yet real, in a world that doesn’t yet exist.
In his first interview since getting the job, Herrera lays out the tech—and threats—his group will now be focusing on. His priorities show how much the NSA’s targets are changing, balancing its work surveilling terror groups with an appreciation of how rapidly the geopolitical landscape has shifted in recent years. And he explains why the rise of new technologies, in terms of both threat and opportunity, are at the heart of what his group must contend with. Read More
Countdown To Bitcoin’s End — Crypto-Breaking Quantum Computers Are Closer Than You Think
Born on January 3, 2009, bitcoin is a little over one decade old. Yet a surprising number of people believe this first-generation cryptocurrency is immutable and indestructible. A little over a decade in, and some are proclaiming its the new gold. But with the accelerating growth in quantum computing power, how long can bitcoin’s reputation remain untarnished? Truth is, the threat to bitcoin’s integrity may be approaching far faster than most people realize. From a 30,000 foot perspective, bitcoin might just be a short blip in the history books, just like many of the fiat currencies that have come and gone.
… Many crypto enthusiasts are proclaiming that bitcoin is the new gold. Bitcoin is a legitimate store of value because its unbreakable. After all, it has an entire 12 year track record behind it.
… But a whole 12 years into “immutable” and there’s already a slight glitch in bitcoin’s armor. Algorithms that can decipher bitcoin’s private keys already exist. Shor’s algorithm and Grover’s algorithm, devised in 1994 and 1996 respectively, can be used to challenge asymmetric cryptography and hashing — the two mechanisms that secure a blockchain. And although we still don’t have computers powerful enough to execute these algorithms, most experts believe its not a question of if, but when this day will come. Read More
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