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
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
Unless the quantum computer research is regulated in a similar fashion (ie. basically setting up a secret "science town"), the peer-review process will suffer from the lack of contact with the outside world and this will inevitably lead to bad science.
The owls are not what they seem
Found this snippet here:Looks like the algorithm has already been found...just waiting for the hardware to run it on at this time.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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 a matter of fact, post 9/11 the US has put alot of pressure on some biotech research labs and universities to NOT publish some of their results (or to leave out key details from some of the papers they publish). The rationale is of course to prevent terrorists from learning too much about deadly diseases, how to replicate them, etc. There are also, apparently, rules preventing "transfer of knowledge" to non-US scientists. So, for instance, if a non-US professor is visiting a US university, the US professors are not allowed to show the guy how certain machines work, or how certain procedures work. The idea is to protect the US (both economically -- avoid giving away information, and security-wise -- avoid bad people learning sensitive details). The problem, from what I've been told, is that the details are too vague, and so most scientists don't really understand what they are allowed to do and not. The whole idea of regulating scientific research is, in my opinion, misguided, because:
1. It flies in the face of the open exchange of information, upon which science is based. Progress is stifled when scientists cannot freely communicate.
2. It's mostly pointless. Labs in other parts of the world are just as up-to-date as the US. Canada, Europe, China, Taiwan, etc... they are all working on these same things (be it biotech or quantum computing). One country putting regulations on it is silly. It would be better to spend the money on international efforts to prepare with *dealing* with the technology, not preventing it from happening.
Take Quantum Computing: frankly, it's going to be worked on whether you like it or not. So you can either make scientists hide their results (in which case a breakthrough may occur in secret, with that person reaping the rewards), or you can have open research, where the whole world will be able to see the problems ahead and make appropriate changes.
Really the whole thing is silly. No lab on earth is going to suddenly jump from our current state to a fully-functional quantum computer. There will be plenty of steps along the way, and plenty of notice that quantum computers are "coming soon." Thus, we will have time (measured in years or decades) to switch our security infrastructure over to something that is secure against quantum computers (such as, for example, quantum encryption). The emphasis should be on planning for how we will use the technology, not limiting its growth.
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.
Which leads to the inevitable: Waiter, is that a Quantum Computer in my soup? I ordered noodles.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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."
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...
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.