Mediaboss Marketing

Quantum computing offers incredible computing power and is set to transform many areas such as research. However, it also represents a threat to current security systems as cracking passwords and encryption keys becomes much easier.

So quantum is a security threat, but is there a solution to making systems safer? We spoke to David Williams, CEO of symmetric encryption specialist Arqit, to find out.

BN: Why are current encryption techniques no longer adequate?

DW: First, public key cryptography was not designed for a hyper-connected world, it wasn't designed for an Internet of Things, it's unsuitable for the nature of the world that we're building. The need to constantly refer to certification providers for authentication or verification is fundamentally unsuitable. And of course the mathematical primitives at the heart of that are definitely compromised by quantum attacks so you have a system which is crumbling and is certainly dead in a few years time.

A lot of the attacks we've seen result from certifications being compromised, certificates expiring, certificates being stolen and abused.

But with the sort of computational power available from a quantum computer blockchain is also at risk. If you make a signature bigger to guard against it being cracked the block size becomes huge and the whole blockchain grinds to a halt.

BN: Where did you start to look for a solution?

DW: The person who solves this will become very successful, so in 2017 we began an innovation journey. The tech that we had back then most definitively did not work, it didn't solve the problem. What we now have is a product which is called Quantum Cloud. It's just a a lightweight software agent that's 200 lines of code that can be delivered from the cloud and it can be downloaded into any device. We can put it into an IoT sensor, or a battleship, it doesn't matter, it's the same software for all devices.

What that software does is it creates keys for groups of devices that want to communicate securely, so it could be two or 20 or 2000 devices, and they all undergo a process whereby they create a brand new symmetric encryption key, which they then use to communicate securely. We know that symmetric encryption key is computationally secure. A symmetric encryption key is just a long random number, and even a quantum computer in future will not be able to crack it in less than billions of years. Symmetric encryption keys have been used for decades, delivered by human courier, and therefore the algorithm to use such keys is already built into the world's software systems which means there's no great change required for the world to adopt the use of this technology.

We didn't invent symmetric encryption keys, we invented a way to distribute them securely.

BN: Can you give us an idea of how this works?

DW: Imagine two end points in in London and New York who want to create a secure channel. Each device talks to a data center in its city. In each location there are Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) which have identical sets of the encryption key data. That data is put there by 'satellites' which use a quantum protocol to deliver that information in a method that we can demonstrate is provably secure.

Think of the data centers as buckets, three times a day the satellites throw some random numbers into the buckets and all data centers end up with an identical bucket full of identical sets of random information. So, the endpoints talk to the data centers, which have a conversation and they agree on some information or clues to send in common to the end points, without actually knowing what that information is. In a very clever mashup of those clues, and the existing data that they have on their devices, the end points then create simultaneously a brand new random number.

BN: Is this available today?

DW: The satellite technology is still a couple of years away, currently the root source of random numbers is delivered to data centers by a random number generator in a data center, through some terrestrial mechanisms, which is regarded by our customers as secure today. It's not quantum safe yet, but the network gets upgraded in two years time when the quantum satellites launch and the whole thing becomes quantum safe.

BN: How will it tie in with a zero trust world?

DW: Conventionally with satellite quantum encryption, you can either be zero trust or you can be global, you can't be both. Well that makes the whole thing a bit pointless because the internet's global. Our technology is simultaneously zero trust and global. So, in our protocol the satellite is never trusted with the key, an individual receiver is never trusted with the key. It is a zero trust system. But secondly, the endpoint software adds another layer of zero-trust functionality. The data centers never have the key, the key is never created somewhere else and distributed. The key is created locally on the device, and therefore there is no other device in the network which we're trusting with the key. Therefore, the software protocol is also zero trust.

BN: Will the end user logging into their bank or VPN see any difference?

DW: It's unlikely that a consumer will ever see the operation of our new software, you won't see it sitting on your device called 'Arqit's product', it will be baked into other people's applications and it will be a seamless experience for the average customer.

BN: Are there wider applications for the technology?

DW: One of the things we're most excited about is JADC2 (Joint All-Domain Command and Control), which is basically the military Internet of Things. This involves lots of devices that need to operate in dynamic environments. You can't possibly give every single device that you might feasibly want to communicate with a set of keys to cope with every possible scenario its simply impossible. And in JADC2 we have to rely currently on old fashioned public key cryptography.

But if every device can just download the lightweight quantum cloud agents, then as soon as you agree that drone needs to talk to that satellite, which needs to talk to that other commander, they just set up brand new key dynamically in real time. We can create unbreakable and trustless keys in the moment that they needed and we can change the access rights.

Of course the same problem is also solved in the enterprise and for consumer devices. So yes, the application of our technology is everything, everywhere. There is no application we've ever thought of where the technology can't make things stronger and simpler.

Photo Credit: The World in HDR / Shutterstock.com

More here:
Why quantum computing is a security threat and how to defend against it [Q&A] - BetaNews

As the global quantum computing market is forecast to reach over EUR 50 billion by 2030, Finnish companies have started cooperation to capture the business opportunities emerging from advances in quantum technologies.

OP Financial Group, Accenture, CSC IT Center for Science, and globally recognized quantum technology companies Bluefors and IQM are the first to join BusinessQ, a VTT-coordinated network to support businesses in the adoption and development of quantum technologies and solutions. The companies will work together to build a business roadmap for Finland around the opportunities of quantum technologies.

Bringing together companies and organisations with quantum expertise, as well as potential end-users, BusinessQ works to position Finnish businesses to the global forefront of adapting new quantum-enabled technologies.

Developments in quantum technologies will create new opportunities for Finnish companies. At VTT, we have decades of experience in turning emerging technologies into viable business, and now we want to foster an active community and support Finnish industries and society in capturing the benefits of quantum technologies early on, says VTTsErja Turunen, Executive Vice President, Digital technologies.

BusinessQ wants to grow and attract new companies from different industries to join the network. Cooperation and dialogue can benefit both companies and the quantum research community as it provides a better understanding of the different industry challenges that quantum-based technologies could tackle in the future.

Discussions with our first BusinessQ partners have shown that Finnish businesses have curiosity, ambition, and an open approach to quantum technologies. We are eager to welcome more companies from different industries and want to build an active business community around the opportunities of quantum technologies,explainsHimadri MajumdarManager of Quantum Programmes at VTT.

Finland also has an active research community that fosters innovation around quantum technologies. In April 2021, Aalto University, Helsinki University, and VTT announced InstituteQ: The Finnish Quantum Institute aims at raising the readiness of Finnish society for the disruptive potential and implications quantum technologies will have for society and the economy at large. In this context, it coordinates operations that foster collaboration in research, education, innovation and infrastructure in the field of quantum technologies. BusinessQs activities share the mission of InstituteQ in strengthening Finlands growing quantum ecosystem. VTT also hosts Finlands first quantum computer that is being built in Espoo in partnership with IQM.

This article was first published on September 22 by CSC.

Continue reading here:
CSC-IT: Finnish businesses start cooperation to capture the benefits of quantum technologies - Science Business

The system will let researchers perform calculations and solve problems that current supercomputers cannot handle.

Henrik5000/iStock.com

Backed by a multi-million-dollar federal grant, a research team from three major universities will soon start working on a pioneering supercomputing system that allows scientists and engineers to align its processors, accelerators, memory and other hardware components to best serve their needs.

This innovative system will operate increasingly complex levels of software while sidestepping the hardware bottlenecks that often hinder high-level computations. This system will let researchers perform calculations and solve problems that current supercomputers cannot handle.

On Oct. 1, 2021, researchers from Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) will begin collaborating on a prototype for what they call the Accelerating Computing for Emerging Sciences (ACES) system.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide $5 million for ACESs development and an additional $1 million per year over five years to pay for system operation and support.

Texas A&M Interim Vice President for Research Jack Baldaulf expressed gratitude to the NSF for its substantial investment in the ACES project. We are thankful to NSF for the opportunity to lead such an important initiative and to our Texas A&M HPRC staff and collaborators at UT Austin and UIUC for making this a successful effort, Baldauf said. Computational science is critical to our national needs and the ACES platform will not only advance research but also help educate the future workforce in this area.

The teams goal is to develop an all-inclusive system that will serve researchers across a wide range of scholarly disciplines and computer skills, according to Honggao Liu, executive director of Texas A&Ms High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) and the projects principal investigator.

These disciplines include artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, health population informatics, genomics and bioinformatics, human and agricultural life sciences, oil-and-gas simulations, new-materials design, climate modeling, molecular dynamics, quantum-computing architectures, imaging, smart and connected societies, geosciences and quantum chemistry.

The ACES system will support the national research community through coordination systems supported by the NSF, Liu said. In this way, the ACES system will provide invaluable support to cutting-edge projects across a broad spectrum of research disciplines in the nation. ACES will also leverage HPRCs efforts that promote science and broaden participation in computing at the K-12, collegiate and professional levels to have a transformative impact nationally by focusing on training, education and outreach.

Researchers should think of ACES as a cyber-buffet, said Timothy M. Cockerill, director of user services, TACC at UT Austin, and a co-principal investigator on the ACES project. Theyll be able to essentially build the custom environment they require on a per job basis and not be constrained to the contents of a physical server node, Cockerill said.

ACES will open new avenues to scientific advancement, said Shaowen Wang, head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, professor at UIUC and a co-principal investigator on the ACES project. Exciting advances on many science frontiers will become possible by harnessing the hybrid computing resources and highly adaptable framework offered byACESto enable increasingly complex scientific workflows driven by geospatial big data and artificial intelligence, Wang said.

Also serving as co-principal investigators are Lisa M. Perez, associate director for advanced computing enablement, and Dhruva Chakravorty, associate director for user services and research, both from HPRC at Texas A&M.

Research that generates breakthrough discoveries will require highly advanced computer designs that can meet the challenge, Texas A&M Senior Associate Vice President for Research Costas N. Georghiades said. With the increasing complexity of computational problems in the big-data era we live in, it is no longer sufficient to use traditional supercomputers which rely only on optimizing the software, Georghiades said. The ACES system will also be able to adapt hardware resources on the fly to tackle complex computational tasks more efficiently. Texas A&M is proud to lead this effort in collaboration with our university partners at UT Austin and Illinois.

Technical description

ACES leverages an innovative composable framework via PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) Gen5 on Intels upcoming Sapphire Rapid (SPR) processors to offer a rich accelerator testbed consisting of Intel Ponte Vecchio (PVC) GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), Intel FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), NEC Vector Engines, NextSilicon co-processors and Graphcore IPUs (Intelligence Processing Units).

The accelerators are coupled with Intel Optane memory and DDN Lustre storage interconnected with Mellanox NDR 400Gbps InfiniBand to support workflows that benefit from optimized devices. ACES will allow applications and workflows to dynamically integrate the different accelerators, memory and in-network computing protocols to glean new insights by rapidly processing large volumes of data and provide researchers with a unique platform to produce complex hybrid programming models for effectively supporting calculations that were not feasible before.

About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the worlds leading research institutions, Texas A&M is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery, including science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M generated annual expenditures of more than $1.131 billion in fiscal year 2020. Texas A&M ranked in the top 25 of the most recent National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development survey based on expenditures of more than $952 million in fiscal year 2019. Texas A&Ms research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental, and applied contributions resulting in economic benefits to the state, nation, and world. research.tamu.edu

Originally posted here:
Trailblazing Supercomputer Will Enable Scientists And Engineers To Optimize Its Hardware To Support Groundbreaking Research - Texas A&M University...

Quantum computers are machines that use the properties of quantum physics to store data and perform computations. This can be extremely advantageous for certain tasks where they could vastly outperform even our best supercomputers.

Classical computers, which include smartphones and laptops, encode information in binary bits that can either be 0s or 1s. In a quantum computer, the basic unit of memory is a quantum bit or qubit.

Qubits are made using physical systems, such as the spin of an electron or the orientation of a photon. These systems can be in many different arrangements all at once, a property known as quantum superposition. Qubits can also be inextricably linked together using a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The result is that a series of qubits can represent different things simultaneously.

For instance, eight bits is enough for a classical computer to represent any number between 0 and 255. But eight qubits is enough for a quantum computer to represent every number between 0 and 255 at the same time. A few hundred entangled qubits would be enough to represent more numbers than there are atoms in the universe.

This is where quantum computers get their edge over classical ones. In situations where there are a large number of possible combinations, quantum computers can consider them simultaneously. Examples include trying to find the prime factors of a very large number or the best route between two places.

However, there may also be plenty of situations where classical computers will still outperform quantum ones. So the computers of the future may be a combination of both these types.

For now, quantum computers are highly sensitive: heat, electromagnetic fields and collisions with air molecules can cause a qubit to lose its quantum properties. This process, known as quantum decoherence, causes the system to crash, and it happens more quickly the more particles that are involved.

Quantum computers need to protect qubits from external interference, either by physically isolating them, keeping them cool or zapping them with carefully controlled pulses of energy. Additional qubits are needed to correct for errors that creep into the system.

Read the original here:
What is a quantum computer? | New Scientist

ZDNet Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto

A team of Australian and Canadian researchers have published a new study they say demonstrates a path towards scaling individual quantum bits (qubits) to a mini-quantum computer by using holes.

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) said the work indicates holes are the solution to operational speed/coherence trade-off.

"One way to make a quantum bit is to use the 'spin' of an electron, which can point either up or down. To make quantum computers as fast and power-efficient as possible we would like to operate them using only electric fields, which are applied using ordinary electrodes," FLEET said, alongside researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) hosted by the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and participants from the University of British Columbia.

"Although spin does not ordinarily 'talk' to electric fields, in some materials spins can interact with electric fields indirectly, and these are some of the hottest materials currently studied in quantum computing."

The group explained the interaction that enables spins to talk to electric fields -- the spin-orbit interaction -- is traced back to Einstein's theory of relativity. They said the fear of quantum-computing researchers has been that when this interaction is strong, any gain in operation speed would be offset by a loss in coherence.

Read more:Quantum computing: A cheat sheet(TechRepublic)

"Essentially, how long we can preserve quantum information," FLEET said.

"If electrons start to talk to the electric fields we apply in the lab, this means they are also exposed to unwanted, fluctuating electric fields that exist in any material (generically called `noise') and those electrons' fragile quantum information would be destroyed," Associate Professor Dimi Culcer, who led the theoretical roadmap study, added.

"But our study has shown this fear is not justified."

Culcer said the team's theoretical studies show that a solution is reached by using holes, which can be thought of as the absence of an electron, behaving like positively-charged electrons.

"In this way, a quantum bit can be made robust against charge fluctuations stemming from the solid background," FLEET said.

"Moreover, the 'sweet spot' at which the qubit is least sensitive to such noise is also the point at which it can be operated the fastest."

"Our study predicts such a point exists in every quantum bit made of holes and provides a set of guidelines for experimentalists to reach these points in their labs," Culcer added.

Over in Japan, RIKEN and Fujitsu have jointly opened a new centre to promote joint research and development of foundational technologies to put superconducting quantum computers into practical use.

The RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Center will see the development of hardware and software technologies to realise a quantum computer with as many as 1,000 qubits and develop applications using a prototype quantum computer.

These efforts will be centred around RIKEN's ongoing work with advanced superconducting quantum computing technologies along with Fujitsu's computing technologies, the pair said.

More here:
A 'hole' new world for the potential of mini quantum computers