Have computer hackers met their match? Not quite yet. But new research suggests that so-called quantum computers now in development could lead to data transfer that is "perfectly secure."
Quantum computers may sound like a dream, promising to make massive calculations atblazing speeds, but some experts have dreaded them. To a computer security specialist, the fact that a quantum computer can break encryption codes is exciting, but it's also scary; how are you supposed to keep quantum data safe? A paper published in the latest issue of Science appears to fill this major gap in quantum computers' defenses before any hackers are able to take advantage of it.
Even after quantum computers become advanced enough to be useful, not everyone's going to have their own. There will may be just a few of them in the world, and users will connect with them to use their computational power the same way you might log onto Dropbox to get a file. With so many users on the system, it could be a disaster if someone compromised the security.
The idea behind blind quantum computing is that the computer processing data doesn't know anything about the input, the computation it performs on that input or the resulting output.
In conventional schemes, by contrast, the computations -- in this experiment's case, measurements -- are known to the quantum computer, so it knows what algorithm it's running.
The methodology Barz's team used has the client preparing qubits "in a state only known to himself, and [tailoring] the measurement instruction to the state of the qubits," Barz said. "The server does not know the state of the qubits and thus cannot interpret the measurement instructions. The server gets zeroes and ones as outcomes, but cannot interpret the values, whereas the client can."
In addition to providing greater security, blind quantum computing might help cut costs for law enforcement agencies, which need to store vast amounts of data.
"A number of law enforcement agencies have been researching cloud computing as a way to reduce the costs of maintaining vast quantities of digital evidence, but security has been a major consideration," Darren Hayes, CIS program chair at Pace University, told TechNewsWorld. "Quantum security may quell their fears."
Quantum computers may sound like a dream, promising to make massive calculations atblazing speeds, but some experts have dreaded them. To a computer security specialist, the fact that a quantum computer can break encryption codes is exciting, but it's also scary; how are you supposed to keep quantum data safe? A paper published in the latest issue of Science appears to fill this major gap in quantum computers' defenses before any hackers are able to take advantage of it.
Even after quantum computers become advanced enough to be useful, not everyone's going to have their own. There will may be just a few of them in the world, and users will connect with them to use their computational power the same way you might log onto Dropbox to get a file. With so many users on the system, it could be a disaster if someone compromised the security.
The idea behind blind quantum computing is that the computer processing data doesn't know anything about the input, the computation it performs on that input or the resulting output.
In conventional schemes, by contrast, the computations -- in this experiment's case, measurements -- are known to the quantum computer, so it knows what algorithm it's running.
The methodology Barz's team used has the client preparing qubits "in a state only known to himself, and [tailoring] the measurement instruction to the state of the qubits," Barz said. "The server does not know the state of the qubits and thus cannot interpret the measurement instructions. The server gets zeroes and ones as outcomes, but cannot interpret the values, whereas the client can."
In addition to providing greater security, blind quantum computing might help cut costs for law enforcement agencies, which need to store vast amounts of data.
"A number of law enforcement agencies have been researching cloud computing as a way to reduce the costs of maintaining vast quantities of digital evidence, but security has been a major consideration," Darren Hayes, CIS program chair at Pace University, told TechNewsWorld. "Quantum security may quell their fears."
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