The paradox of Schrödinger’s cat—in which a quantum cat is both alive and dead at the same time until we check to see which state it’s in—is arguably the most famous example of the bizarre counter-intuitive nature of the quantum world. Now, Stanford physicists have exploited this feature weirdness to make highly detailed movies of the inner machinery of simple iodine molecules.
Definitely less than a decade and even less than 7 especially with China Quantum Satellite, Google’s plan release next year of a Quantum device, etc. I hope folks don’t still believe that we’re immune from a QC attack after 2025.
In a rare public speech, Greta Bossenmaier, chief of the Communications Security Establishment, said cryptologists at the CSE and around the world are racing to find new cryptographic standards before Y2Q — years to quantum — predicted for 2026.
She is the third senior CSE official this week to warn publicly of the threat quantum computing poses to widely used public key cryptography (PKC), protecting sensitive data transmissions from hackers, hacktivists, foreign state spies and other malicious actors.
READ MORE: Why the silencing of KrebsOnSecurity opens a troubling chapter for the internet.
The diamond microdisk made by Paul Barclay and his team of physicists could lead to huge advances in computing, telecommunications, and other fields.
Barclay and his research group — part of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Quantum Science and Technology and the National Institute of Nanotechnology — have made the first-ever nano-sized optical resonator (or optical cavity) from a single crystal of diamond that is also a mechanical resonator.
The team also measured — in the coupling of light and mechanical motion in the device — the high-frequency, long-lasting mechanical vibrations caused by the energy of light trapped and bouncing inside the diamond microdisk optical cavity.
The team’s article in Nature Photonics says the demonstration ‘constitutes a milestone towards a global quantum internet,’ as it is one of the longest distances over which quantum teleportation has been achieved using a fibre-optic network in this way.
In a “major step” toward practical quantum networking, researchers at the University of Calgary have successfully demonstrated the teleportation of a light particle’s properties between their lab and the city’s downtown area, six kilometres away.
“What is remarkable about this is that this information transfer happens in what we call a disembodied manner,” said physics professor Wolfgang Tittel, whose team’s work was published this week in the journal Nature Photonics.
“Our transfer happens without any need for an object to move between these two particles.”
QC will need to be on any IT, Security, and/ or tech connected product future state roadmap that spans a 5 + year period because the planning, funding, change management (retooling of resources), etc. will take time to plan & prepare not to mention all those internal & external dependencies and their own efforts around QC in the future because it truly would stink to see an AT&T, or HomeDepot, etc. that invested in their own QC compliant infrastructure suddenly attacked because an external source that they pull from is not QC.
The encryption we take for granted as being uncrackable would have a limited shelf-life in the quantum age, says a security expert.
My suggestion; don’t be one of those companies and governments in the next 5yrs that waits until the 9th hour meanwhile others planned, invested, and executed properly so they’re not exposed like you are.
The race to create new cryptographic standards before super-fast quantum computers are built that can rip apart data protected by existing encryption methods isn’t going fast enough, two senior Canadian officials have warned a security conference.
“I think we are already behind,” Scott Jones, deputy chief of IT security at the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), responsible for securing federal information systems, told the fourth annual international workshop on quantum-safe cryptography in Toronto on Monday.
Quantum computing – or more accurately, computers that use quantum mechanics – is not a dream, Jones and others told the conference of business executives, crypto academics, IT companies and government officials. One prediction is there’s a one in seven chance that by 2026 a quantum computer will exist that can break RSA-2048 encryption. It may take longer — or, if there’s an advance, shorter.
Random numbers have become important in daily life, given how they are at the heart of e-commerce and secure communications and also form the basis of statistical methods of solving problems in engineering and economics. And yet, truly random numbers are difficult to generate. A series of seemingly random numbers can still show patterns, and this can lead to frauds in e-commerce or errors in computations. Carlos Abellani, Waldimar Amaya, David Domenech, Pascual Munoz, Jose Capmany, Stefano Longhi, Morgan W Michell and Valerio Pruneri from the Institutes of Science and Technology and the Institute of Research and Advanced Studies at Barcelona, Polytechnic University and the firm, VLC Photonica, at Valencia and the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnology at Milan, describe in the Optical Society’s journal, Optica, a method of using quantum effects to generate truly random numbers with the help of a miniature device that can be embedded in a mobile phone. The operative quality of random numbers is that those in a series cannot be predicted from the preceding ones, nor even any of the digits that appear in them.
Once a random number has been exchanged by a pair of correspondents, they can base a code on this number and keep their exchanges confidential. Devices like computers, which handle e-commerce transactions, thus routinely generate hundreds of large random numbers. The numbers generated by a complex formula are based on a “seed” number to get started, and do pass many statistical tests of randomness. The numbers, however, are not truly random and if a third party should guess the “seed” that was used, he/she could work out the numbers and impersonate others in transactions. Real random numbers are created not by a formula but by physical processes, like the last digits of the number of grains in a handful of sand, the throw of honest dice or even the last digit of the daily stock market index.
