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ROSELAND, N.J., April 24, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sectigo, a global leader in automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), and digital certificates, today announced it is sponsoring and speaking at the RSA Conference (RSAC) 2023 in San Francisco, California. Sectigo executives will discuss the importance of establishing digital trust against the backdrop of shortening digital certificate lifespans and quantum computing.

RSAC, which takes place April 24-27, features the most influential thinkers in cybersecurity today, discussing current and future trends to empower organizations around the world to stand against cyber threats. Sectigo, a Silver Sponsor of RSAC (booth #1327), will demo the CA Agnostic automation capabilities of Sectigo Certificate Manager, the industrys most robust Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) Platform. In the wake of recent news of the upcoming reduction in maximum term for SSL certificates to 90 days, IT professionals worldwide are seeking to understand the consequences of this change on their operations. CLM is an indispensable part of that response.

The trend of shrinking certificate lifespans, or short life certificates, is one Sectigo predicted as far back as 2019. In recent years the maximum term for a public TLS certificate has dropped from three years, to two, to one. Recently, Google announced in its Moving Forward, Togetherroadmap the intention to reduce the maximum possible validity for public TLS certificates from 398 days to just 90. As we enter a new era of shorter certificate lifespans and quantum computing, the need for automation of certificate handling is sky high, said Tim Callan, Chief Experience Officer at Sectigo.

Callan continued: Sectigo recognizes that organizations of all sizes are struggling to reconcile growing numbers of digital certificates within their ecosystems. Many still take a manual approach to certificate lifecycle management. Our latest research found that 47%1 of organizations cited using spreadsheets, scripts, or CA-provided tools to manage digital certificate lifecycles. As the security perimeter continues to widen, and certificate lifespans to reduce, this manual approach to digital certificate management will compound IT team workloads and hamper visibility into all digital identities. Ultimately, this creates risk of outage or exploit.

The Sectigo team will be conducting hourly demos at RSAC 2023 to show the power of automated certificate management to solve issues arising from the manual management of increasing numbers of short-life certificates, as well as:

In addition, Sectigo experts will look ahead at an exclusive session at RSAC, designed to help IT leaders future-proof their cryptography against the upcoming threat of quantum computing, which will require switching all encryption to quantum-resistant post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

Are You Ready for the Quantum Apocalypse? 4:20pm April 25, presented by Sectigos Tim Callan, Chief Experience Officer: Quantum computing is a very real threat, and now is the time to start planning for fast, efficient, and error-free deployment to new cryptographic standards soon to be available. The immense processing power of a quantum computer is capable of breaking encryption at great speed, leaving important data vulnerable. Both government and private industry alike should be preparing today, or they risk being late. Find out more here.

Sectigo also won two Global InfoSec Awards 2023 from Cyber Defense Magazine, announced today at RSAC: Next Gen Enterprise Security and Cutting Edge Security Company of the Year. These accolades closely follow recognition for Sectigo executives popular industry podcast, Root Causes, which was designated Webby Honoree at the recent Webby Awards 2023.

Visit http://www.sectigo.com/rsac23 to schedule a meeting or book a demo at RSAC.

About SectigoSectigo is a leading provider of automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions and digital certificates- trusted by the worlds largest brands. Its cloud-based universal CLM platform issues and manages the lifecycles of digital certificates issued by Sectigo and other Certificate Authorities (CAs) to secure every human and machine identity across the enterprise. With over 20 years establishing digital trust, Sectigo is one of the longest-standing and largest CAs with more than 700,000 customers. For more information, visitwww.sectigo.com.

1 Managing Digital Identities: Tools & Tactics, Priorities & Threats, Sectigo Research, Conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 2021.

Contact:

Elliot Harrison, Director of Global Communications Sectigo elliot.harrison@sectigo.com

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Sectigo Attends RSAC 2023 to Prepare IT Community for 90-Day TLS - GlobeNewswire

US intelligence agents are after scores of Russians in connection with dastardly global plots and outright criminality.

More than 60 Russian nationals are wanted by the FBI, America's security services.

The fugitives are sought for their alleged involvement in an eclectic mix of crimes and schemes, ranging from manipulating US elections to smuggling quantum computers.

Here are some of Russia's most wanted:

Burlinova is accused by the FBI of gathering intelligence for Moscow in the US.

With the support of the Russian Security Service (FSB), she allegedly recruited Europeans and Americans into a 'Meeting Russia' programme run by the NGO she led, Creative Diplomacy.

Here she is believed to have assessed their views towards Russia and gathered their personal and professional information, which was then passed on to the FSB in exchange for funding and other support for her NGO.

While in the US,Burlinova toured universities and research institutions, allegedly supplying more detailed info on those with sympathies towards Russia.

She was last known to be in Moscow.

Creative Diplomacy denies the charges against Burlinova.

Writing on Twitter in April, it said there is no proof to the allegations against her, decrying "acts of provocation and speculation in [the] mass media".

No surprises here, for some.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Russia's notorious Wagner mercenary group, is wanted by the US secret services for allegedly interfering in the 2016 US election that saw firebrand Donald Trump enter the White House.

Described as a "deeply disreputable character", the former hot dog seller rose up the ranks doing the Kremlins bidding, be it using his private militia for shady business on the African content or waging war in Ukraine.

Some have alleged Prigozhin has political ambitions of his own, possibly eyeing up the top spot as Russian president.

The FBI claim Prigozhin "oversaw" an electoral interference operation by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), widely seen as a "troll farm" which he funded.

He is accused of a conspiracy to defraud the US by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions" of the Federal Election Commission, the United States Department of Justice, and the United States Department of State, they said.

His plot involved creating hundreds of fake online accounts, which spread content that reached significant numbers of Americans.

The FBI is offering $250,000 for any information that might lead to his arrest.

Hailing from Leningrad, Livshits is accused of unlawfully sourcing and shipping sensitive US military technologies to Russia.

The FBI says he managed to get his hands on advanced equipment used in quantum computing, hypersonic missiles, nuclear weapons development, and other military and space-based applications.

His clients included the Russian intelligence agencies Ministry of Defence, besides some of the countrys universities.

Livshits, operating under the aliases Boris Levitan, Boris Livshitc and David Wetzky, allegedly helped finance and smuggle tens of thousands of American-manufactured, military-grade sniper bullets.

He has ties to Russia, Estonia, Finland, Kazakhstan, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, and the United States.

A warrant has been issued for this arrest.

Gavrilov, an FSB officer, is wanted in connection with a Russian hacking campaign in the global energy sector.

Along with fellow officers Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov also wanted by FBI agents the 44-year-old allegedly hacked computer systems at oil, gas and renewable energy firms, electricity grids, nuclear power plants and technology companies.

This then enabled the Kremlin to target and disrupt them.

Operating in an FSB military unit, the trio were codenamed Dragonfly" "Energetic Bear," and "Crouching Yeti.

More than 380 foreign companies based in 135 countries were hit, including Albania, France, Germany, Hungary, China, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

Pliskins last whereabouts were in the Russian capital.

In October 2020, a jury in Pennsylvania returned an indictment against him and five other of the Kremlins intelligence officers for his alleged involvement in a spate of politically-charged cyber crimes.

The FBI claims Pliskin helped target critical infrastructure in Ukraine, a political campaign in France, international victims associated with the 2018 Winter Olympic Games and investigations of nerve agent attacks that have been publicly attributed to the Russian government.

All of these destructive and disruptive actions [were] for the strategic benefit of Russia, writes the FBI.

Born in 1998, Dekhtyarchuk was previously a student at Ural State University in Yekaterinburg Russia.

The FBI accuse the 25-year-old of a long list of cyber crimes

He is suspected of operating a criminal marketplace that sold thousands of login credentials, personal information and other useful tools for other crooks to access the online accounts of people around the world.

Any tip-offs can be given to the FBI online, over the phone or at an American Embassy.

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Who are the fugitive Russians on FBI's 'Most Wanted' list? - Euronews

Union Cabinet has given its approval for the National Quatum Mission.

Union ministers Anurag Thakur and Jitendra Singh announced today in a Cabinet briefing that the National Quantum Mission has received approval from the central government in an effort to encourage economic growth driven by quantum technology and elevate India to the forefront of this sector.

The mission, according to Union Minister Anurag Thakur, would continue from 2023-2024 to 2030-31 and cost a total of Rs 6,003.65 crore. He said this decision would propel India's technological advancements to unprecedented heights.

Mr Singh said that the decision to launch the National Quantum Mission is one of the most important steps taken by the government in the last nine years.

The minister said that India is the biggest user of information technology, and quantum technology is directly related to it.

This quantum technology is essentially related to information processing. This technology is better than the existing infrastructure of classic computers, which are transistor-based, as it is based on atom-based technology, which is much faster than the present technology.

It makes information processing fast, authentic, precise, and secured. He also said that the National Quantum Mission will give India a quantum jump in the technology sector.

India will be the sixth country to have a dedicated quantum mission after the US, Austria, Finland, France, and China.

Let's have a look at what is quantum computing and the advances made by India:

What is quantum computing?

According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), quantum computing is an emerging field that applies some basic principles of quantum mechanics to process information at radical speeds. A quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit is made up of electrons or photons. Their spin or polarisation represents the state of the quantum, respectively.

According to the Microsoft, the quantum in "quantum computing" refers to the quantum mechanics that the system uses to calculate outputs. In physics, a quantum is the smallest possible discrete unit of any physical property. It usually refers to the properties of atomic or subatomic particles, such as electrons, neutrinos, and photons.

Quantum computers harness the unique behaviour of quantum physics-such as superposition, entanglement, and quantum interference-and apply it to computing. This introduces new concepts to traditional programming methods.

Advances India is going to make in it:

The government will set up four thematic hubs (T-Hubs) in top academic and national research and development institutes on the domains of quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum sensing and metrology, and quantum materials and devices.

The hubs will focus on the generation of new knowledge through basic and applied research and promote R&D in areas that are mandated for them.

Benefit to the country

Mr Singh said the mission can take the technology development ecosystem in the country to a globally competitive level.

The mission would greatly benefit communication, health, financial, and energy sectors, as well as drug design and space applications.

It will provide a huge boost to national priorities like Digital India, Make in India, Skill India, Stand-up India, Start-up India, Self-Reliant India, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), Mr Singh said.

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Quantum Computing: What It Is And Advances Made By India - NDTV

In many ways, the current spate of generative artificial intelligence (AI) services like ChatGPT can thank Nvidia (NVDA 0.95%) for their existence. Nvidia researches and designs semiconductors that accelerate computing time -- most notably GPUs (graphics processing units), originally used for high-end video game graphics and now being applied to train large-language models (LLMs) that ChatGPT runs on.

But a new breed of computing accelerator is being developed: quantum computing. Nvidia has announced software geared toward quantum computing researchers over the last few years. But does its latest hardware announcement, the DGX Quantum, propel the company into the world of designing quantum computing systems, too?

Nvidia's DGX Quantum is actually a collaboration with Israeli start-up Quantum Machines, which makes some hardware components for a quantum computing system. Specifically, DGX Quantum features a new Nvidia Grace Hopper GPU paired with an OPX+ from Quantum Machines, a "quantum control" unit that orchestrates the operations of a quantum computer.

The DGX Quantum, an Nvidia Grace Hopper GPU system paired with a Quantum Machines OPX+. Image source: Nvidia.

What does that mean? DGX Quantum isn't itself a quantum computer. Rather, it's a component in a quantum computing system, albeit an important one at this early stage of research and development for practical use of quantum computing.

According to Nvidia, a complete quantum computer requires a QPU (quantum computing processor, akin to a CPU or GPU), a system to perform operations on the QPU, a way to measure and record the resulting data, and a way to create and connect multiple QPUs that can operate with each other.

Quantum DGX is thus a means to govern the operation of this quantum computer system. And Quantum DGX will also make use of Nvidia's CUDA Quantum software stack, a hybrid platform of classical computing (CPUs and GPUs) and quantum computing (QPUs) that unifies an entire system to make it useful for researchers.

A growing number of quantum computer operators (like the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan), quantum hardware makers IonQ, and start-up software developers (Agnostiq and QMware) have adopted CUDA Quantum in their operations.

The first deployment of the Quantum DGX hardware, the Israel Quantum Computing Center, is expected by the end of 2023.

At its most basic level, quantum computing is simply a means to further speed up computing times, enabling researchers to experiment with big problems that classical computers can't solve. Accelerated computing is Nvidia's specialty, so dabbling in quantum computing research is a natural fit for the semiconductor company.

But as its management told me in a recent conversation, widespread commercialization of quantum computing is still likely many years off. And when it does start to take root, quantum computing will supplement classical computing, not replace it -- much like Nvidia GPUs have accelerated the work traditionally handled by CPUs, not replaced them. Think of quantum computing and the QPUs that power them as another (future) extension of the classical computing work already done up to this point.

And given their industry-leading performance, Nvidia GPUs are helping propel this virtuous cycle of using the most advanced technology of today to develop the cutting edge technology of tomorrow.

Given that quantum computing is in its nascent stage, most investors who want to bet on it would be best suited by sticking to long-term ownership of stocks like Nvidia at this juncture.

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Nvidia Is a Top Stock to Bet On in Quantum Computing - The Motley Fool

Enlarge / The D-Wave hardware is, quite literally, a black box.

D-Wave

Before we had developed the first qubit, theoreticians had done the work that showed that a sufficiently powerful gate-based quantum computer would be able to perform calculations that could not realistically be done on traditional computing hardware. All that is needed is to build hardware capable of implementing the theorists' work.

The situation was essentially reversed when it came to quantum annealing. D-Wave started building hardware that could perform quantum annealing without a strong theoretical understanding of how its performance would compare to standard computing hardware. And, for practical calculations, the hardware has sometimes been outperformed by more traditional algorithms.

On Wednesday, however, a team of researchers, some at D-Wave, others at academic institutions, is releasing a paper comparing its quantum annealer with different methods of simulating its behavior. The results show that actual hardware has a clear advantage over simulations, though there are two caveats: errors start to cause the hardware to deviate from ideal performance, and it's not clear how well this performance edge translates to practical calculations.

D-Wave's hardware consists of a collection of loops of superconducting wires. Current can circulate through the loops in either direction, with the direction providing a bit value. Each loop is also connected to several of its neighbors, allowing them to influence each other's behavior.

When properly configured, the system can behave as what's called a "spin glass," a physical system with complex behavior. A spin glass is easiest to think about as a grid of magnets, with each magnet influencing the behavior of its neighbors. When one magnet is in a given orientation (like spin up), it becomes more energetically favorable for its neighbors to have the opposite orientation (spin down). If you start with a disordered systema spin glassthen the influence of each magnet on its neighbors will cause spins to flip as the system tries to find a path to the lowest energy state, called the ground state.

This process is called thermal annealing, and it has some limits. In a standard spin glass, it's possible to end up in situations where every path to the ground state goes through a high-energy barrier. This can trap the system in a local minimum instead of allowing it to evolve into the ground state.

D-Wave's system, however, shows quantum behavior. This allows it to undergo tunneling, where it passes between two low-energy states without ever occupying intervening high-energy states. So, quantum annealing is expected to have better overall performance than thermal annealing.

The behavior of spin glasses has been studied separately from D-Wave's hardware because they can be used to model a variety of physical processes. But the company's business is based on the fact that it's possible to map a variety of optimization problems onto the behavior of a spin glass. In these cases, having the spin glass find its ground state is the mathematical equivalent of finding the optimal solution to a problem.

But again, we lack the theoretical understanding of whether it's possible to get these solutions in some other way that's faster or more efficient.

To get a better sense of how its hardware performed, the research team started by validating the D-Wave hardware using a small spin glass consisting of only 16 spins. "At this scale we can numerically evolve the time-dependent Schrdinger equation," the researchers write, meaning that the behavior of the system during quantum annealing could be directly calculated. That was compared to the same process running on a small corner of one of D-Wave's Advantage processors, which have roughly 5,000 individual qubits. (They actually ran 100 of these 16-spin systems in parallel on the processor.)

These results confirmed that the D-Wave processor undergoes the expected quantum annealing process. In fact, they found that the results generated by the D-Wave processor were a better match for the Schrdinger calculations than either of two ways we can model annealing: either simulated thermal annealing, or simulated quantum annealing.

With that validation in hand, the team turned to much larger spin glasses, consisting of thousands of spins. At this point, it's no longer realistic to use Schrdinger's equations: "Simulating the Schrdinger dynamics of QA with a classical computer is an unpromising optimization method, as memory requirements grow exponentially with system size." Instead, the researchers compared D-Wave's hardware to simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing.

Both the actual hardware and the simulators all showed a similar behavior, in that the energy gap between the system and its ground state decayed exponentially as a function of annealing time. Put differently, the system starts in a relatively high-energy state, and the energy gap between that and the ground state gets smaller as a function of time raised to a power.

The key difference between the methods is the exponentthe bigger the exponent, the faster the system approaches its ground state. Simulated quantum annealing had a higher exponent than simulated thermal annealing, while the D-Wave machine had a higher exponent than either of them. And that indicates that doing quantum annealing in D-Wave's hardware will get to a solution considerably faster than simulated annealing can.

The one problem identified in the study came when the researchers explored how the system scaled with the number of spins being tracked. For both simulations, there was a consistent relationship between annealing time and the amount of energy left in the system. By contrast, the performance of the D-Wave hardware tailed off slightly, bringing it somewhat closer to the performance of the simulated quantum annealing. This is a product of a loss of coherence in the systemin essence, errors crop up and keep the hardware from behaving as a single quantum system.

The results are still closer to optimal than the ones that are produced in this time by either of the annealing simulations. But the scaling isn't as good as it is when the system retains its coherence. And D-Wave has indicated that improving coherence is a goal for its next generation of processors.

While spin glasses are interesting to physicists, D-Wave is selling time on its systems as a way to solve optimization problems more generallyspecifically those with practical implications. But it's difficult to translate the results in this paper to these practical problems, though the team suggests that's the next step: "Extending this characterization of quantum dynamics to industry-relevant optimization problems, which generally do not enable analysis via universal critical exponents or finite-size scaling, would mark an important next step in practical quantum computing."

Put more simply, Andrew King, director of performance research at D-Wave, told Ars that "industrial problems generally don't even have a well-defined notion of scaling in the same way that these spin glasses do."

"For industrial problems, I can say that problem A has more variables than problem B, but there may be other confounding factors that make problem B harder for unexpected reasons," King said. In addition, there are some cases where highly specialized algorithms can outperform a general optimization approach, at least as long as the size of the problem remains small enough.

Despite the practical uncertainty, the empirical demonstration of a scaling advantage in quantum annealing hardware would seem to settle what had been an open question about D-Wave's hardware.

Nature, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05867-2 (About DOIs).

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Quantum effects of D-Waves hardware boost its performance - Ars Technica