Security professionals would balk at the notion of a computer code so perfectly unbreakable that you couldn’t crack it entering, exiting, or even performing its operations on a system, but a team of scientists says they’ve accomplished exactly that with what’s called “blind quantum computing.”
The researchers, led by Stefanie Barz of the University of Vienna’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology, reported in Friday’s issue of Science that they are able to transmit an algorithm to a computer, run it, and receive it back even as the computer’s operator is completely unable to snoop on those operations.
Quantum computing is still highly theoretical, with experiments in the science and its cousin, quantum cryptography, limited to laboratory settingsthere are no practical quantum computers, just experimental ones. The basic concept is to use the odd nature of the entangled quantum bits, or qubits, that one uses to build a quantum computer to perform computational tasks much faster and much more securely than is possible on digital computers that use silicon transistors.
At the exceedingly tiny level where quantum mechanics operates, particles of matter can exist in multiple statessuch as “on” and “off” to reference the binary process by which digital computing operatesat the same time. We may not be able to comprehend what this means outside of mathematics, but scientists have theorized for several decades that harnessing these properties for computing would be a natural way past the issues that loom for today’s nanoscale silicon-based transistors, which are running up against atomic-level barriers to functionality the smaller they get.
While other researchers have described a blind quantum computing protocol, Barz’s team appears to be the first to have actually demonstrated one working.
The researchers from Austria, Ireland, Singapore, Canada, and the U.K. write that their findings could pave the way for “unconditionally secure quantum cloud computing.” The team reports that it was able to “exploit the conceptual framework of measurement-based quantum computation that enables a client to delegate a computation to a quantum server” and thus create input, computation, and output processes on the target system in such a way that it “all remain[s] unknown to the computer.”
In less rarified terms, what this means is that in the future you might be able to use a cloud service like Google Docs to do some computational business on someone else’s servers, secure in the knowledge that there is literally no way for the servers’ owner or even the server itself to detect what you’re doing.
Thank the Uncertainty Principle for thatsimply by observing a quantum computational operation, you would change it. In the case of Deutsch’s algorithm and Grover’s algorithm, which the researchers sent to their quantum computer to perform and then send back to them, it would mean that if you somehow could get a peek at those operations, the intelligibility of what was transpiring would be destroyed before you ever got a chance to look at it.
And the process is actually blind going both ways. According to the scientists, whoever sent an algorithm to a quantum computer for it to perform wouldn’t be able to see inside that system either.
Pretty cool stuff. Now someone just needs to figure out how to build a practical quantum computer.
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Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399176,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121
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