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Nice.


“We’ve managed to put quantum-based technology that has been used in high profile science experiments into a package that might allow it to be used commercially.”

Random number generators are crucial to the encryption that protects our privacy and security when engaging in digital transactions such as buying products online or withdrawing cash from an ATM. For the first time, engineers have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.

In The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research, Optica, the researchers report on their fully integrated device for random number generation. The new work represents a key advancement on the path to incorporating quantum-based random number generators — delivering the highest quality numbers and thus the highest level of security — into computers, tablets and mobile phones.

UC Davis has developed the KiloCore, a CPU that has 1000 cores suited for parallel tasks like encryption, crunching scientific data, and encoding videos.

Processor technology has certainly come far, with a host of different materials and techniques being implemented to increase speed and power. And now, we have a new kind of development. A team of scientists at UC Davis made the world’s first 1000-core processor.

The team has unveiled the KiloCore, a CPU that has 1000 cores and all the speed that come with that kind of power. The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

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The Gatekeeper keychain uses bluetooth 4.0 technology with an AES encryption method to automatically lock your computer when you walk away.

Every office has that one coworker—that person who sneaks on to your computer and posts absurd messages on your various social media pages. Fortunately, computers come with handy security features and are generally password protected.

“But!” you think, “what about those times that I forget to lock my computer?”

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There is a computing revolution coming, although nobody knows exactly when. What are known as “quantum computers” will be substantially more powerful than the devices we use today, capable of performing many types of computation that are impossible on modern machines.

But while faster computers are usually welcome, there are some computing operations that we currently rely on being hard (or slow) to perform.

Specifically, we rely on the fact that there are some codes that computers can’t break – or at least it would take them too long to break to be practical. Encryption algorithms scramble data into a form that renders it unintelligible to anyone that does not possess the necessary decryption key (normally a long string of random numbers).

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I have been seeing this for the recent weeks; I find it interesting and another step in China’s own move to be a global leader of tech. Could be either good or bad in the longer term.


China is taking a more inclusive tack in instituting cybersecurity standards for foreign technology companies, allowing them to join a key government committee in an effort to ease foreign concerns over the controls.

The committee under the government’s powerful cyberspace administration is in charge of defining cybersecurity standards. For the first time, the body earlier this year allowed select foreign companies— Microsoft Corp. MSFT −0.39 %, Intel Corp. INTC 0.43 %, Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO 0.14 % and International Business Machines Corp.—to take an active part in drafting rules, rather than participating simply as observers, said people familiar with the discussions.

How much influence the foreign companies will have over committee deliberations remains to be seen, these people said. Over the past few months, the committee’s seven working groups—which focus on encryption, big data and other cybersecurity issues—have each met at least once.

Interesting read on IPC Systems Inc. is partnering with U.K. startup Post-Quantum to (in their own words) “offer its clients encryption, biometric authentication and a distributed-ledger record-keeping system that the software company says is designed to resist hacking — even by a quantum computer.” — I will be researching this more.


(Bloomberg) — When it comes to cybersecurity, no one can accuse IPC Systems Inc., the New Jersey-based company that builds communications networks for trading firms and financial markets, of preparing to fight the last war.

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I can honestly say that many of us working with QC hasn’t warned folks for a while on the hacking risks around QC going against even today’s most sophisticated encryption models & methods; and to be developing a strategy in how to best handle this risk. With last weeks launch by China has shown the world that we are definitely not a decade away from this risk.


Education and planning are key, cyber-security expert Tyler Cohen Wood says.

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A pioneer in the biohacking scene since the mid-2000s, Amal Graafstra’s been experimenting with RFID implants for more than a decade. Now Graafstra is developing implants that go beyond RFIDs.

In episode 2 of Humans+, Motherboard travels to his company Dangerous Things’ garage headquarters to get an early look at UKI, a prototype implant focused on encryption that’s expected to be released in 2017. Amal hopes that this technology will bring us one step closer to merging our physical and digital identities, but how will society react to having these technologies implanted beneath our skin?

WATCH NEXT:
This Mind-Controlled Bionic Arm Can Touch and Feel: http://bit.ly/2bShxqj

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Hope they’re working with QC researchers in Los Alamos and DARPA; it is the US Government which is known for its silos and multi-layer bureaucracies.


Quantum computing is a novel way to build computers — one that takes advantage of the quantum properties of particles to perform operations on data in a very different way than traditional computers. In some cases, the algorithm speedups are extraordinary.

Specifically, a quantum computer using something called Shor’s algorithm can efficiently factor numbers, breaking RSA. A variant can break Diffie-Hellman and other discrete log-based cryptosystems, including those that use elliptic curves. This could potentially render all modern public-key algorithms insecure. Before you panic, note that the largest number to date that has been factored by a quantum computer is 143. So while a practical quantum computer is still science fiction, it’s not stupid science fiction.

(Note that this is completely different from quantum cryptography, which is a way of passing bits between two parties that relies on physical quantum properties for security. The only thing quantum computation and quantum cryptography have to do with each other is their first words. It is also completely different from the NSA’s QUANTUM program, which is its code name for a packet-injection system that works directly in the Internet backbone.)