Are You Safe Against Quantum Computers? – Part 2: Quantum Cryptography

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2020

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In my previous blog post, you could read about classical cryptography and a fraction of the vast amount of use cases for quantum computers. In addition, we established that quantum computers make use of two particular phenomena: superposition and entanglement. In this blog post, you can read about why quantum cryptography is already a use case today for some organizations.

A classical computer will take longer than the current age of the universe to crack RSA-encryption, whereas a quantum computer will be capable to crack RSA-encryption in just seconds.

Harvesting the quantum world
As a result of the quantum behavior, quantum computers can calculate solutions to hard problems exponentially faster than all the computers that exist in the world today combined (including the most powerful supercomputers). Imagine the potential as follows. When you are computing the fastest route in a maze, a classical computer would have to decide at every junction to go one way or the other. This can be represented as going left (0) or right (1). A quantum computer, however, would not have to decide on one way: it just follows every path there can be at the same time by making use of superposition and entanglement. This can be represented as going left (0) and right (1). This allows for its exponential improvement in performance over classical computed bits.

Quantum Cryptography
Now, regarding cryptography, a classical computer will take longer than the current age of the universe to crack RSA-encryption (300 trillion years), whereas a quantum computer will be capable to crack RSA-encryption in just 10 seconds. That’s just the power of nature right there. So, do you have to be afraid right now? Not yet. At least, if you don’t care about the data you have today in 10 years. Quantum computers that can crack RSA-encryption will not exist for a while, but there are a couple of companies and governments that have to hurry right now. Imagine that you are able to steal information from a company or government today. Then you are probably not able to decrypt it right now. However, if you hold it on for 10 years, then a quantum computer can decrypt it fairly easily. This is only useful if the data is still relevant in 10 years. So, companies and governments that have such sensitive, time-invariant data that cannot be made public have to become resistant against quantum computing right now! Therefore, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is bringing together bright minds to come up with new encryption algorithms that are quantum resistant. But this takes time. And until then, sensitive, time-invariant data is at risk.

Were you intrigued by my posts? Rate them! And if you have questions, comments, or suggestions about this amazing topic, let me know below!

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Are You Safe Against Quantum Computers? – Part 1: How Do Quantum Computers Work?

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October

2020

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It is Blue Monday when you are leaving for the skiing holiday. You take the train to the airport, but everything is against you today. The train is delayed because the train table has been changed to bad-weather-conditions. Since you are waiting for the train to come, you decide to check your stock portfolio. Maybe that makes you a little bit more happy. Unfortunately, you lost money again. After one hour of delay, you arrive at the airport 30 minutes before departure. Luckily, you caught your flight. Just when you are chilling out, the pilot broadcasts that a stopover will be made because the airport of destination has become overcrowded with too many planes landing at the same time. After two hours of extra delay, you finally arrive at the ski resort. But then, Blue Monday really kicked in: your rheumatism begins showing its annoying symptoms again.

“Quantum computing could identify patterns that will allow us to identify something like COVID-19 earlier.” – Heather West, Senior Research Analyst at IDC

A quanta of solutions
This is an example with problems that occur to many people around the world at a daily rate. However, this might not be for too long anymore! Quantum computers are potentially capable to address aforementioned problems exponentially faster than contemporary computers. Scheduling, portfolio optimization, route optimization, and personalized medicine are just a small fraction of the vast amount of problems that quantum computers can potentially solve (see video below). If full quantum computers existed today, COVID-19 would not even be such an issue right now. But how? With quantum computers? That sounds like something of the far future? But it is closer than you think. Although mainstream use cases are probably out for more than 10 years from now, one use case is already important yesterday for some organizations: cryptography.

Classical cryptography
Most contemporary cryptography is based on RSA-encryption and is used by for example, websites, banks, and even some cryptocurrency. It is based on a mathematical problem that is called a one-way function. In this case, it means that it is easy to multiply two prime numbers and get a solution, but it is very hard to only have the solution and find the two corresponding prime numbers. For small prime numbers this is easy to do. But the larger the prime numbers get, the exponentially harder it becomes to solve. This is where the strength of quantum computing lies.

Magical behavior
Quantum computing is a form of computing that makes use of the laws of physics for the smallest particles in the universe, called quanta (hence: quantum computing). The laws of physics for these tiny particles are very different from what we are used to in our daily lives. This odd behavior is exactly what quantum computers make use of. Without going too much into the intricacies of the quantum world, this odd behavior results in two phenomena: superposition and entanglement. Shortly, superposition means that a particle can be at an infinite possible locations at the same time. Entanglement means that all these particles that are in a superposition are connected with each other: a change in one particle directly affects the other particle faster than the speed of light – this is not a lie! This might sound like magic to you, but it is not.

“Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.” – Arthur C. Clarke

So, if you don’t understand it fully, that is ok. Just imagine that these quantum particles can behave in this strange way.

That is a lot to digest. So, take a break and come back later to read more about why quantum cryptography is already a use case today in my next blog post.

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Quantum computing – The next frontier after Moore’s Law?

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October

2016

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google-quantum-computer

The producers of processors are facing a serious problem. In a few years, building faster processors with the technology as we know it will not be possible anymore. So far, building faster processors was essentially a matter of placing as many transistors as possible on one chip. The more transistors, the faster the chip. As Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) observed in 1965, the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. He stated that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. This is known as the Moore’s Law. Regarding computer processors, it is possible to upgrade their performance by building smaller transistors and placing more and more on one chip. Nevertheless, this process is about to reach its limit. As soon as chip technology reaches the atomic level, the density of transistors reaches a physical limit. To give you an idea how dense the transistors are placed, in the year of 2000, 37.5 million transistors could be placed on one chip, in 2017 IBM projects to place 20 billion (yes billion) transistors on one chip. The most recent manufacturing techniques used are performed on a 7 nanometer scale. As a comparison, a human hair is approximately 80,000- 100,000 nanometers wide. The limit where it is still feasible financially to develop a chip would be 7 nanometers. A leading scientist in the field, Colwell, emphasized that by 2020 the limit of Moore’s Law, currently about 5 nanometers, will be reached.
What does that mean for the computer industry? Will we be stuck with the same processing power for years?computer

There are some promising alternatives that have yet to be fully translated from theory into practice. Next to alternatives like increasing the performance of storage drives,
overclocking processors while cooling them down to almost absolute zero,
one alternative seems most assuring.
Quantum computers are what organizations like Google, IBM or the NASA are looking into.

A prototype quantum annealer by the company D-Wave, recently acquired by Google, was able to perform a task a 100
million times faster than a convential processor. Or 10,000 years faster than a convential computer. This task is not performed easily though. The quantum computer needs to be cooled to a hundredth of a degree Celsius above absolute zero (−273.15°C), in order to create a somewhat stable environment. That is the reason the quantum computers as of today are called quantum annealer. The quantum annealer is also very sensitive to electromagnetic waves, like visible light, radio, infrared or x rays. It is therefore considered to be yet extremely unstable and very costly to use. This makes it very difficult to scale, since you cannot build a laboratory around a quantum annealer every time you want to upgrade your performance.
The technique behind it is fascinating however.

Imagine a switch that you can either switch on or off.homerswitch
That is how bits of today’s computers essentially work. They can either represent a 1 or a 0.

A quantum computer bit however, called qubit, can represent a 1, a 0 or both at once. This is confusing enough, however the possibilities do not stop here. With each qubit added to another, the total number of potential states doubles. Two qubits can represent a state of 00, 01, 10 and 11 at the same time.

This is an example of so called superposition.

This opens up seemingly endless possibilities in terms of performance. It means that the more data the computer has, the faster it is.

Now remember the problems that we are not yet able to solve, since we are missing the computer performance to analyze or calculate all the variables. Popular examples are simulating molecules in their entirety, compute any scientific experiment virtually, crack any so far known encryption technique, airline scheduling, financial analysis, cancer radiotherapy, gene research or simply improve web search.

Some scientists state that the creation of the first universal quantum computer will be similar to society as switching on the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in Chicago in 1942. That definitely changed the world as we knew it. Luckily, The most recent quantum computer are not there yet and can only be used for very narrow, specific tasks. A so called universal quantum computer however can be applied to many processes, much like a PC of today – only a million times faster.

Do you have ideas for further applications of the process powers offered by quantum computers? What are in your opinion dangers or opportunities for quantum technology? As an example, Google is on the forefront of building a quantum computer, what are Google’s capabilities with their collected data?

 

References

Aaronson, S., & Technology, M. I. of (2013). Quantum computing since Democritus. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Adiabatic quantum computation (2016). . In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_quantum_computation

Aron, Jacob. (2016, August 31). Revealed: Google’s plan for quantum computer supremacy. Retrieved October 1, 2016, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130894-000-revealed-googles-plan-for-quantum-computer-supremacy/

Boixo, S., Isakov, S. V., Smelyanskiy, V. N., Babbush, R., Ding, N., Jiang, Z., … Neven, H. (2016, July 31). Title: Characterizing quantum supremacy in near-term devices. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263

Crothers, B. (2013, August 28). End of Moore’s law: It’s not just about physics. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from https://www.cnet.com/news/end-of-moores-law-its-not-just-about-physics/

Finley, K. (2014, September 5). The Internet finally belongs to everyone. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from Business, https://www.wired.com/2014/09/martinis/

Freiberger, M. (2015, October 1). What can quantum computers do? Retrieved October 4, 2016, from https://plus.maths.org/content/what-can-quantum-computers-do

Gaudin, S. (2015, December 15). Quantum computing may be moving out of science fiction. . Retrieved from http://www.computerworld.com/article/3015538/emerging-technology/quantum-computing-may-be-moving-out-of-science-fiction.html

HuChenming— (2016). Moore’s law. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits

Simonite, T. (2016, February 4). Inside Google’s quantum computing lab, Questing for the perfect computer. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544421/googles-quantum-dream-machine/

Launching the quantum artificial intelligence lab. (2013, May 16). Retrieved from https://research.googleblog.com/2013/05/launching-quantum-artificial.html

Staff, datascience@berkeley. (2014, March 5). Moore’s law and computer processing power – Blog. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from https://datascience.berkeley.edu/moores-law-processing-power/

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