Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Computing Regulation Already?
RMX writes "A new CNet article discusses the possibility of regulating quantum computing.
We already see our top tier US VCs investing in Quantum computing companies outside the country. Apparently the feds seem to think regulating the amount of technology that can be sent overseas will make the US safer." From the article: "Only rough prototypes of quantum computers presently exist. But if a large-scale model can be built, in theory it could break codes used to scramble information on the Internet, in banking, and within federal agencies. A certain class of encryption algorithms relies for security on the near-impossibility of factoring large numbers quickly. But quantum computers, at least on paper, can do that calculation millions of times faster than a conventional microprocessor. "
By reading the regulations we change them, so we can't ever know what they actually are.
You can't handle the truth.
"quantum computers, at least on paper, can do that calculation millions of times faster than a conventional microprocessor."
Wow, imagine what they can do on silicone!
I have no doubt the USA, Canada, and the UK will make it illegal to own one to keep code breaking superiority with the governments' spies, rather than criminal organizations.
Does this mean that I shouldn't bother with a 28 character bank password, since it's all going to be moot anyway?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The summary is a bit fuzy on the details, but here's a telling excerpt from the IBM research article on their quantum computer (link here):
This breakthrough completely renders useles the concept of the so-called one-way function, a function which can be executed in polynomial time, but whose inverse can be executed only in exponential time. Basically, this renders just about all public-key cryptographic functions obselete on one stroke.
Interesting times...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
And is in international waters off the South Jersey Shore pointing his browser to your credit line. Muha haha haha haha haha haha haha.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Even if the US regulates what can be exported, how will that stop other countries from developing their own quantum computers with the same technology? We can't count on everyone else having slower computers if faster ones exist...
... about the US considering restricting exports of some technology? Can anyone remember the article I mean?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This is what happens when you make science and education a low priority in your country. If the U.S. isn't the first country to develop a quantum computer then we will be at the mercy of whatever country does.
Only outlaws will have quantum computing.
Quantum mechanics is just a theory, so Quantum Computers will never work.
Like the Kansas Board of Education, we need to proactively discard these so-called "scientific theories" and go back to Intelligently Designed machines, like the abacus.
Perhaps the research groups that the US is so eager to invest in should rule against import to the US if they're going to restrict exports...
RSA encryption is "certain kind of encryption" they are talking about. It's used for the initial cipher key exchange in virtually all forms of secure public sites; if you intercept the key you can read the rest of the transaction at your leisure and, if you can intercept the traffic or forward your own faster, alter it to boot.
-ShadowRanger
Can't that same concept be applied to encrypting the data as well? I mean, if it can break current encryption easily, wouldn't the logic here be that it's capable of an encryption that would take even a quantum computer decades to crack? Or am I missing something here?
"No, you cannot publish this in a peer-reviewed journal, because the evil Arabs/Old Europeans might read it and build an even better quantum computer!"
The owls are not what they seem
Seems with lots of scientific issues as recent news shows beaurocratic morons who know nothing seek useless regulation that will have little affect on anything and only hurt their own economy. I wonder if these guys who decided it'd a good idea to regulate this even have any backgrond in IT though it seems more likely they have no idea a) what they're doing b) what they're talkinga bout.
Since when did we think that it will only be invented here, or even that the teams working on it are only situated in the US? What would be the result be, if say, Japan invented a working 200 Qubit prototype? Does anyone think that the US would sit idly by and let the Japanese gov't say "Umm, this is potentially detrimental to our National Security infrastructure, so NO-ONE can bring any information or working models outside of the country..."
What will they do if 3 researchers are working on this in the US, 6 are in the UK, and 5 others are in Japan..Do they think these people won't be sharing research data, ESPECIALLY if they work for the same company?!
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
In the current day and age where the act of putting up a webpage which can be accessed by anyone around the world with an internet connection is as easy as signing into www.blogspot.com, the effort involved in stopping technology leaks such as encryption far outweighs the benefit of keeping it secret. Relying on an encryption to be safe because the algorithm or solution method is secret is akin to hiding your housekey under your doormat. Somewhere along the line, someone's going to figure it out and you're totally at their mercy after that.
The solution, as it is in most cases of security, is to rely on methods that are simply and thoroughly uncrackable. As we saw the other day, the time to determine the factors of a 640 bit number is 5 months. As computers get faster and algorithms get better, that time will diminish. Once quantum computers arrive, those encryption algorithms will be obsolete.
So use encryption which is not vulnerable. Don't stop the free flow of information to hide your weaknesses.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
1. Quantum computing ends up destroying public-key encyrption, making online banking impossible.
In this case, what Congress is saying is that they want to shield US banks from having to switch back to physical security and authentication as soon as possible, and instead, want to allow banks a grace period, where determined criminals have an opportunity to steal citizen's money.
2. OR, online banking is still feasible
In which case, this was no big deal to begin with, and the lawmakers should have stayed out of it.
I mean, there is going to be some final technical clarity to this, and when we figure that out, we want the US industry to be the most advanced in the world. There's no reason to say that, in areas of safety, that the US should lag other countries.
OK, who wants to write shors-algorithm-in-4-lines-of-perl, so we can start putting it in our sigs?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Once someone builds a quantum computer, and of course, we know that people can build them, then, its obvious that all combinatorial based encryption schemes are doomed and should not be used. The internet as we know it is dead and its time to get over it and figure out where to go next.
This is my sig.
QC is just getting of the ground, very early into its infacy stage and the government is already trying to kill it. Regulation does nothing but keep the small players off the field and allow the big boys to do so by government monopoly. Regulation is nothing but buying favors for protection, something that people seem to ignore.
It's the PGP Retardo Fed Fest all over again. Technology advances, you can only keep a secret for so long, especially depending on potentially hostile foreign governments making the devices or support devices. Particularly when those same potentially hostile governments have massive databases of information on US citizens conveniently supplied by US businesses outsourcing their data management.
Straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel. Deal with it and move along.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There have been restrictions like this on exports for at least a generation.
They are just trying to stay ahead of the curve this time, instead of after the horse has left the barn.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As someone posted above...
For current computers, adding a bit to the key makes it twice as hard to crack; so it's 2^n hard to crack where n is the number of bits.
For quantum computers, adding a bit to the key only adds a constant amount of time it'd take to crack.
128 bit encryption is 2^64 = (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) as hard to crack as 64 bit.
But with quantum computers, 128 bit would only be 128/64 = 2 times as hard to crack as 64 bit.
$8.95/mo web hosting
No. That's how it works with conventional computers, but as an earlier poster mentioned, adding bits to a key will only result in a linear increase in difficulty for a quantum computer. That's why quantum computing is so potentially troublesome.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
Gentlemen, Behold! My space-time continu--
The blurb mentioning "can do that calculation millions of times faster" was the understatement of the day (with this sentence coming in a distant second).
Trillions of billions of millions certainly qualifies as millions. It's just a gross understatement.
Gen. Turgidson [shouting] : "We must not allow a quantum computer gap!"
I'm just waiting for the good doctor to try to restrain his right arm. Damn that was a funny (and thought-provoking) movie. Purity of essence ...
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
On the off chance that somebody that understands Quantum computing is reading this, I have a question.
Does quantum computing have the same theoretical improvements on the discrete logarithm problem?
The discrete logarithm problem is the other popular one way function used in cryptography. This underlies most of the elliptic curve based cryptography.
I understand how that would work b/t two quantum computers but what happens when Joe Public is trying to pay their visa bill from home? Since quantum computers won't be available to the public for a long time isn't the network only as strong as its weakest link (i.e. your silicon based home PC)? Wouldn't part of the encryption have to take place on the silicon based PC?
B O R I N G
Theoretically, we only -think- that somebody can't factor large numbers quickly, but it is has not actually been proven that this is the case. So even without quantum computing, one could still invent the algorithm that does fast factoring and then the world would change.. cause if you can do fast factoring, then a whole class of problems would be solvable more quickly.
This is my sig.
On current computational models adding a bit doubles the time it takes to crack. So if a 64bit key takes a week, a 65 takes 2, a 66 takes 4, 67 takes 8 weeks, 68 takes 16 weeks, etc. (Made up numbers, for the sake of example). On a quantum computer it simply adds a constant amount of time for each bit. So if a 64bit key takes 1 week, a 65 bit key takes 2 weeks, 66 bit takes 3 weeks, 67 takes 4, 68 takese 5, etc. It effectivily brings a NP complexity problem down to a linear complexity problem. All of the rules change at this point.
It will eventually happen. As Quantum Computers become more widely available and used all over the world someone is going to try and devleop one for home use. I see this happening sometime 10 to 20 years down the line. The potential money-making opportunity in selling such a computer to home users will be overwhelmingly appealling.
Imagine a single PC no bigger than a DVD player that can receive thousands of HD channels via WiFi Broadband, plays music in your daughter's bedroom, lets your son fight aliens in his bedroom, calculate your latest tax forms, keep track of the environment inside the house and make adjustments where necessary, and utilize a voice-recognition A.I. based interface. Its the stuff of science fiction but then Quantum Computers were once thought of as sci-fi only a few years ago. Mark my words, this technology will eventually hit the consumer market in some way.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
But does it run on Linux?
Well there goes my hopes for a quantum gaming console by the time I'm 75.
... what did you expect, something profound?
You seem to know a lot about computer science, TMM, so I was just wondering what your background is. Which university did you obtain your PhD from? Indeed, and have you published any papers? I'd be quite interested in reading some of them, if you'd be willing to provide references.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Once upon a time, the U.S. was, more or less, the technology leader. But trends changed when business believed they should cut R&D and all other aspects of doing business that requires technological expertise. (Cutting the numbers, outsourcing, etc) They did this for short-term profit to improve their stock values... whatever the reason, it is and has proven to be extremely short-sighted.
...I don't know why or how, but some people got it in their heads that money and profits are more important than anything else INCLUDING those factors that lead to money and profits!
The result of this, the dot-com bubble bursting and perhaps a few things I can't think of at the moment, there is a massive brain-drain in the US. According to what I've read, there are fewer people signing up for technical careers. Meanwhile, in other countries, they are building their intellectual base to the point of being emerging superpowers.
I remember the U.S. encryption export laws (are they still on the books?) and the supposed reason they were put into place. (Was it to prevent competing nations from getting our superior encryption technology or was it so we could charge people with an additional crime for trafficking in secrets using a more secure tech?) I guess it's not a really good parallel, but I do beleive this type or restriction is a bit too little and too late. The genie is out of the bottle. And unless some serious focus on science, technology and research is made, I believe the U.S. will have lost its last great commodity -- intelligence.
As I understand it. This won't help. Quantum computers can factor your key at some constant factor slower than you can create it. Let's take 2 for example. If it takes 1 minute to generate your key. A quantum computer can factor it in 2 min. If i takes 1 hour to factor your key, a quantum computer can do it in 2 hours. In order to get 640 RSA-like security, you will need to take 2.5 months to generate your key. This is because quantum computers can ignore 1 way functions. Function is polynomial given the inputs to get an output. But exponential given the output trying to recreate the inputs.
Quantum encryption writes the light data it sends most small unit with the substitution of the photon and it relates direction. Teh photon is polarizes toward the east and atempts to crackings code makes detection possible. Changes of orientations becomes the cause which gets up the change which makes detections possible inside.
Kim Su-yeong
Someone else alluded to this, but I'll add to the picture:
Quantum computers can compute on an entire state-space simultaneously, so in the first iteration of a brute-force decryption algorithm, they will find the values that satisfy the result.
If you double the number of bits, you square the size of the state-space, but you only double the size of one iteration, so it is an ineffective way of stopping quantum cracking. Because decryption time on a QC will always be proportional to encryption time.
But there are some more interesting security mechanisms that are actually promised by QC; perfect protection against Man-In-The-Middle attacks for one. If you send a message as a quantum state, and someone reads it on the way to its destination, then it is intrinsically changed, and so when that guy tries to pass it on, it will be garbled.
So Banks will set up quantum communication channels, and if anyone tries to tamper with them, both ends will know immediately and know to safeguard data that was discussed during the compromization period until a clear connection is established. I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of 'perfect communication' isn't more critical to the government's interests in QC, because it makes covert message interception impossible.
It's not all sponge-cakes and panzies though, because the internet is primarilly an electronic system, it will take a while to switch over to 'quantum-secure' mechanisms, and until then, your fancy-shmancy SSL is compromised.
If they keep the qbits isolated from the outside world, as is required, how can we know what they are?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Actually, this is far too useless article.
Quantum computing is not a reality as far as we know.
Few qubits have been realized with a Nuclear Resonance apparatus, but the system is clearly not scalable, it cannot grow to more than 7 qubits (maybe few more, but it must be reimplemented by scratch on a new molecule).
The only thing they could factorize is 15... and it took far more than a microsecond.
Quantum Dot, the most scalable quantum bit ever built, has a 10% error rate, 100000 times more than a relatively bad classical system.
Anyway that experiment proved that Shor's algorith is theoretically valid, we just have to find a completely new way to implement a Quantum Computer. Easy, ain't it?
OTOH quantum crypto has been researched, and a working apparatus realized completely secure (in a fundamental manner) communication over few kilometers (~10Km i think), over the lake of geneve.
When I say fundamental, I say that they could understand whether someone was listening or not (on a ship...) so no eavesdropping was possible.
Banking has nothing to fear from quantum computing.
Laws neither, it is just someone which said "oh its too fast" without knowing what it really is.
Factoring is not proven NPC nor NP, meaning tht we do not know whether it is really a complex problem, or we just don't know an algorithm to di it fast.
Quantum Computing can help NPC problems with a square root improvement on complexity (which means, the task requiring N steps, requires now sqr(N) ) over the best classical algoritm.
We just even don't know if there exist any problem in the NP class which we cannot solve in polynomial time.
Quantum computing is not proven to be better than classical yet.
The problem is, if you can build a quantum computer with n quibits, then building quantum computer with even n+1 quibits is a nontrivial engineering task, much like building an ordinary computer which has 2*n bits of memory from a design with n bits of memory. So while quantum computers are much faster, the cost increases much more with number of quibits, so they will never catch up the key length generated on ordinary computers.
In my personal theory that any advanced technology will eventually be applied to entertainment (in general), and Television (in specific), I predict that Quantum Computing will eventually be applied to the family entertainment center. Only it will fail completely when people discover the uncertainty principle that says you can't watch your show and at the same time know what time it's scheduled... ... or something like that...
}#q NO CARRIER
I took part in a series of lectures back in 2003 in sydney. 2 qubit quantum computers have alreayd been built and the algorithms to work greater qubit computers have been designed. I asked the lecturer who led the research team when they would be avaliable and he said that by 2010 governments might own them. We're a long way off security threats from criminals (unless you consider the government...). But lets hypothesise. The govenement of a country powerful enough to own a quantum computer is trillions in debt and needs a bit of extra revenue. Clickity click...0.01% from every bank account in the world...nobody notices a thing and the government's back in the black
Which leads to the inevitable: Waiter, is that a Quantum Computer in my soup? I ordered noodles.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Just don't let 'em put a Fritz chip in it!
So it does scale linearly, in that sense that it's one qubit per problem bit. If you have a 1024-bit QC, you can break 1024-bit RSA, no sweat. The real question will be whether the difficulty of adding qubits scales linearly. Some physicists think it doesn't...that what you're really doing when you're adding qubits is measuring to tighter tolerances, and there's a limit to how far you can take that. I have no idea whether they're right.
Also, Bruce Schneier proved that with symmetric key algorithms, the best a quantum computer can do is effectively halve the key length.
The way that Muslim countries locked themselves into the 13th Century (their 7th Century) was to regulate innovation. Everything had to be "safe" within their (koranic) laws at the time their theocrats controlled the richest, most sophisticated, powerful, extensive empire in the world. Which forced them into impotence as rivals like Europeans copied their basic science (largely developed from a Classical legacy), and roared past them. Forcing them into colonial slavery for centuries - partly by enforcing their own paranoid laws against learning and innovation.
That's exactly what we're doing to ourselves right now in America. Our ChrisTaliban, backed by the Saudi Arabs who control both the oil and Mecca, are locking our own pinnacle into a time warp. Centuries will pass us by, and we'll look exactly as backwards to the rest of the world as the Muslim world largely looks to us now. Humans haven't changed, so the strategy will work again. Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, but of course the players can reverse roles - if only one remembers the lessons.
--
make install -not war
Wow, so that means that US companies won't be able to sell Chinese-built quantum computers to other countries. (Since, obviously, US companies MUST offshore all non-managerial tasks.)
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
In a world of outsourcing to other countries, as well as the fact that the USA doesn't have a monopoly on brain power, this whole idea could be rendered meaningless the moment someone decides to build their Q-puter[tm] in any other country with less onerous regulations!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
An enlightened tech policy would fund cheap quantum computing. Then everyone could convert breakable encrypted data to new, less breakable encryption. The "democratization" of the tech, with Americans better encrypted than elsewhere, would not only protect national security, but fuel economic security, as foreigners looked to America for security, both tech and legal.
Instead, our Congress and White House are run by paranoid morons whose musclebound response to any crisis is to suppress and destroy. Which is just making us less safe, discrediting us, and funding our enemies and rivals. Fortunately, it's only 12 months until 1/3 of Congress is up for election. If we get rid of these dangerous morons, maybe we'll have a chance to keep an American brand on the future. Because the "Middle Ages" is a moving window that America is rapidly coming to define.
--
make install -not war
Yes, anything we can't see ourselves probably isn't real and can only be explained by a higher power. Nobody has seen 4 billion years of Evolution actually happen, so it probably didn't.
And everyone who looks at a Q-bit sees something different!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Assuming that the definition of exporting is shipping the object across the US border, there shouldn't be much of a problem. Just tell the authorities that the computer went from the place of manufacture to the foreign country without passing through the space between
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So...while quantum computers are cool, and they may eventually do interesting stuff, they're really not an export risk, and probably won't be for at least half a century. But getting status as an export risk can't help but allow researchers in the field to direct more money their way as it makes quantum computing look like a national security issue.
Accepted, although yet to be demonstrated in the real world on actual keys, that quantum computing may well easily compromise public key encryption systems that rely on the one-way difficulty of factoring the product of large primes. My question is, is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) weakened in any way by quantum computers?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sorry for nitpicking but it is not linear, but polynomial. Like the wikipedia page says it has the order O((log n)^3).
Secondly, saying it is "millions of times faster" does not really make sense. We don't measure the efficiency of an algorithm by the actual time it takes but by its complexity. It is likely that the first few quantum computer prototypes will be quite slow and may take longer than classical computers to factor small numbers (I don't know, like 20 digits). However it has a better complexity so: no matter how slow your quantum computer is, it will be faster than all the classical computers in the world once you feed them big enough numbers
Schroedinger's cat is {blink}not{/blink} dead.
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
- Lewis Thomas
Official GOD FAQ.
Quite right in all the point, except one: factoring is polynomial in QComputing, so you go from time 2^N to time C*N^2. Of course C will be very high in the first times... The hard work is realizing a scalable system, as you say...
Quantum computers are snake oil for now.
So far, nobody has even come remotely close to demonstrating any interesting computation being performed on a quantum computer, so at the very least, there is a huge engineering problem.
Worse yet, though, it's not even clear quantum computers can scale up at all; what happens in the kinds of large and complex quantum systems you would construct for computation is not at all understood, but it is almost certain that the laws of quantum mechanics as we know them break down.
Perfect, unbreakable encryption already exists! It is called a One Time Pad, and if used properly, it doesn't matter what type of super quantum computer the other guys have!
Now, many of you will say "There are logistics problems with one time pads that make them ineffective for things like ecommerce or cell phones etc.", and I agree. But banning the export of quantum computers isn't to protect ecommerce or cell phones... it is to protect high level diplomatic and military secrets. A U.S. embassy abroad can send their one time pads in a diplomatic pouch on some sort of high capacity data storage. Problem solved!
Humorless post attempting to be funny. Terrible.
Quantum computing is much more radical. OK, it's partly radical in the sense that we don't really know how to implement it yet, at least for problems bigger than a few bits, but if you can get it to answer questions longer than the Heisenberg Uncertainty limit (about 100 bits), you can really annoy anybody who was assuming that current public-key cryptography was secure. That doesn't mean all crypto is insecure - factoring problems get solved in time ~N, instead of the current 2**(N/3), but symmetric algorithms mostly either don't get hit at all or at worst get solved in time 2**(N/2) instead of 2**N (i.e. SQRT(current_time), so if you double the number of key bits, you're still secure. I'm not sure if elliptic-curve public-key crypto is affected or not. It *does* mean re-inventing key distribution, using techniques like Kerberos or other key-server solutions we had happily left in the past, but we don't lose security entirely.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The concept of _regulating_ quantum crypto is really a stretch, though it's possible some bureaucrat wanted some Top Scientist to come tell them whether they needed to worry about it. After all, the real threat to US military crypto from QC isn't citizens, it's Foreign Spies using Foreigner-developed computers to crack it (though the main threats to military crypto are still bribery and carelessness, not technology.) This is basically the opposite of the 1970s-1990s Export Control regulations scenarios, where the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications. With Quantum Crypto, they should really *want* Americans to develop it first, because that'll let them eavesdrop on lots more foreign communications than if they force the development to happen overseas in secret where only the KGB and Chinese Army have it.
What the US NSA and military most need to worry about with Quantum Crypto is knowing how close it is to feasibility, knowing which of their systems could be cracked by it, and when to start planning on systems that aren't affected. For instance, RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key crypto get trashed, and I'm not sure about elliptic-curve crypto, but symmetric crypto just gets its effective keylength cut in half, so you just need to use longer keys; if the military has to resort to a modernized version of Kerberos, or traditional key-distribution solutions like Marine couriers with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists, that stuff is pretty straightforward to implement if they need it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Limiting the spread of technology and knowledge because of FUD (and also some shorter term money) can give the story a sharp turn ... a U-turn actually.
What if the very first digital computer had been restricted (or "regulated") to only the USA?
No Linux at all (because it's Finnish) and no World Wide Web (because it is world wide!) for example!
And if other countries did the same, no GSM (because it's European) and no spaghetti (becuase they're Chinese)!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Sure. But first can you find me something to store a key that is approximately 2.247x10^290 Exabytes.
I think we're in a bad way here. Recently, especially in the US, everything and everyone has become more conservative - not in the political sense, but in the sense of "I want to maintain the status quo!" Previously, huge advances in technology were liberating, eventually wonderful (albeit disruptive) events for humanity.
However, now whenever we make progress, we try and chain it down as much as possible to avoid anything changing. The Internet and digital content is a great example. Inventing the equivalent of a global Library of Alexandria, where everyone has access to all information, and transferring and copying information from place to place was easy and cheap, should have been a cause for celebration. We should have all rejoiced that now humanity was free to share all its ideas and art with everyone on the planet. But instead, we get legal and technological attempts to hamper that ability as much as possible, because it upsets the status quo. I imagine the same thing would happen if someone had come up with "replicators" that could feed and clothe the needy - they would instantly be controlled and limited so that they didn't disrupt the way things were, despite the obvious boon to humanity.
Now it's the same thing with quantum computing - we've eliminated another scarcity (processing power) and instead of celebrating the freedom we go about trying hard to restrict it so that it's like we never made the breakthrough.
There's a part in 1984 where it's revealed that the endless war is really just a means for burning through the surplus of materials and labor that a technologically advanced society has, so that people can be kept poor and overworked. While I doubt there's a conspiracy behind these current restrictions (besides the conspiracy of the status quo) I think the parallels are interesting.
This, to me, is the number one compelling reason for progress - so we can get rid of all the people whose power depends on keeping us from progressing.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Quantum crypto is theoretically amusing, but it practice it's boring. It lets you connect two sites together with dedicated fiber optics and run unbreakable-via-physics crypto over it, but that's a lot more expensive and incovenient that using whatever transmission medium supports your communication speeds and running unbreakable-via-mathematics crypto over it.
By "unbreakable-via-mathematics", do you mean information-theoretic secure (e.g. secure against all attacks, independent of physics), or computationally-secure (secure against attacks using a reasonably-sized classical computer)? The issue is that there aren't any information-theoretic algorithms out there for key distribution, only for encryption once you have a shared secret key the size of the message (I'm talking about one-time pad encryption). If you mean computationally secure, then AFAIK there are no public-key algorithms known to be computationally secure against a classical computer, let alone a quantum computer. Even RSA was not known to be computationally secure--people just strongly suspected it was. For all we know, there may be an efficient classical attack against it.
Is all this paranoia? Not if you need forward security (e.g. your secrets still need to be secret in 20 years when we might have quantum computers), or if your secrets are valuable enough that people would be willing to hire genius mathematicians to try to break your cryptosystems. The first case is more common than you might think: consider medical records, for instance. If you're young now, and you get an abortion or whatever, that could come back to haunt you when you run for office in 20 years. Even normal people do need forward security for certain things.
I should say that my background is in quantum computing and physics, with a more limited understanding of cryptography. If you're aware of some algorithms for public-key cryptography that have been proven to be information-theoretic secure or even just computationally secure, I would love to hear about them. I don't know too much about public key beyond RSA, and would be interested to hear more about elliptic curve crypto. It would be interesting to try to see if it's vulnerable to the quantum fourier transform.
... the 1970s-1990s Export Control regulations scenarios, where the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications.
I'm curious: Do you have evidence to suppor that claim, or is it a conspiracy theory?
I mean, I wouldn't put it past our government (or any other) to perpetrate exactly those kinds of shenanigans. I was just wondering if you had any proof of the government's alleged ulterior motives in that particular case.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Factual error in parent: ... instead of the current 2**(N/3)
>factoring problems get solved in
Should read:
2**(N**(1/3)). GNFS is exponential in the cube root of N, not the cube root of the exponential of N. There's a big difference.
ricl (rolling in chair laughing)
-pyrrho
the thing about quantum computing is this:
.truth turns out to be phenomenally stranger than fiction.
to break a code now... mol, by brute force, you try one... see if it works, try the next.
with quantum computing you merely try ALL the keys at once with a single call, and the one that is right "survives".
wierd huh?
but the thing is, the quantum bit is not a 0 OR 1, it's a 0 AND a 1, superimposed... so a quantum byte (qyte?) is not "a number 0 to 255", but is "all the numbers from 0 to 255" simultaneously.
It's weird, but don't blame me... physicists discovered the world is even wierder than it seemed to be..
-pyrrho
you said "cat"!
clever.
CLEVER!
-pyrrho
that made a ton of sense... rotating the state space into view... I get that better than I had before.
-pyrrho
By the same token, what company is going to want to fund the development of quantum computing in the US if they know that their research is going to be crippled by this law, and that they won't be able to export to the other technology-hungry countries when they finally develop a product?
For those of you who may be wondering why we want quantum computers, it's not because breaking encryption is all that useful. The real revolution will come with it's ability to simulate quantum mechanical systems, they will make it possible to simulate and design molecules much larger than today and could revolutionize molecular biology and nanotechnology. It's still not known if the increase in speed is only possible with quantum computers or if better classical algorithms may do the trick though.
Hmm, I can see it working like this...
Fed1: All your q are belong to US!
Fed2: Drop that photon to the ground, Mr Jones, and kick it slowly towards me.
Fed3: And don't try anything silly with those quarks you're hiding. In our world, sonny, the state quantizes YOU!!!
Mr Jones: Don't do it! Don't do it! I was only trying to flip my electron!
by the time this computer is finaly made, we would all have our fingerprints as the password.
At least by the 1990s, and for the most part by the late 80s, almost all of the political pressure was coming from the FBI, and most of the PR examples they were giving were about domestic situations such as narcotics wiretapping. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was pretty obvious that there was no remaining threat from Communist spies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But there's a lot of work out there on key distribution methods that don't use public-key crypto, such as Kerberos and the various other flavors of Key Distribution Center systems. Sure, they're a lot more annoying, and there are real benefits from public-key that made most of that stuff get left in the dust, but within the capabilities they have, they really do work.
Quantum computing doesn't appear to bother symmetric crypto algorithms much - it's a sqrt(N) attack, so you basically need to double key sizes, but you can still play the usual "computer the size of a planet" keysize calculation games, unless you believe that Moore's Law really will continue indefinitely, in which case you add 100 bits to the keylength to get yourself an extra 100-200 years of coverage. And you also make sure that when you're done using stuff, you delete it.
Medical records turn out to be an interesting special case - consumers all want that information to be kept private, but insurance companies want it spread around to everybody who might need to use it, and HIPAA gets balanced by the "keep records of everything so you don't get malpractice suits" precautions. It was relatively easy to protect records privacy when the records were kept on paper and the main threats were Xerox and carbon paper. These days, rather than wiretap your doctor's internet connection, it's much easier for the Feds to subpoena your insurance company. (Not everybody has insurance, of course, but most people who don't have it aren't important enough to get a court order to wiretap their doctor for either, except maybe drug dealers who can pay cash.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Looks like in the future we'll have to use one time passwords after all.........
Now I'm confused. You started by saying that the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications.
Then, when I asked you if you had any evidence that the government was using Commies as stand-in for U.S. citizens, you replied that they were not, in fact, using Commies as an excuse: almost all of the political pressure was coming from the FBI, and most of the PR examples they were giving were about domestic situations such as narcotics wiretapping.
Again, it wouldn't surprise me if they had been using the "Commie" bogeyman as a cover for their secret agenda contra US citizens, but from the way you're telling the story it sounds like they did nothing of the kind. And isn't "US citizens" a pretty broad descriptor for the targets of an FBI investigation? Normally, they're called "suspects" or "criminals". If you're implying that the FBI was actually targetting US citizens wholesale, that's another thing I'd love to see some evidence for.
Anyway, the "commies"-to-narcotics transition seems about right, for that period of recent history: First the major powers get the technology, and include it in their strategies and counter-strategies in the 80s. As the technology matures, it becomes more widespread (especially in the West, with its greater amount of freedom), until by the 90s the FBI has to deal with it in their own more mundane domestic investigations. Your narrative certainly supports this interpretation.
I thought you had something interesting here. But this all seems pretty pedestrian to me.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
... i think you could, there are finite candidates, but I wouldn't be surprised if you comp-sci teacher knows something here on this... quantum computing is surreal and complicated... maybe there is some gotcha in that case... maybe something strange because you cannot just decrypt you have to compare between other routes? there will be some extremely weird stuff about not disentangling the qubits early...
-pyrrho
...It took 50 years for the stealth bomber to be made public, I'd imagine something like quantum computing would be held secret as long as possible.
Are you talking about this http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/b-2.htm stealth bomber? If so are you saying that it was flying in 1933?
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?