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Malware In Quantum Computing?
MattSparkes writes, "Today's quantum computers are not sophisticated enough to do anything malicious to your online bank account; the field is in its infancy. However, there are in theory more ways to attack quantum computers than classical ones. As quantum networking takes off, this is going to become a larger and more immediate problem." The Wikipedia article correctly identifies as an unsolved problem in physics the question of whether it is possible to construct a practical computer that performs calculations on qubits.
Anyone want to post the correct links?
(must post anonymously so people don't figure out I RTFA)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Does that mean by not looking at it it will cease to exist?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Just don't install Windows Vista XP Pro, which, ironically, requires a quantum computer to run.
I'm a little uncertain, but I think that you can either know what's been infected, or how fast it's being infected, but not both...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...There are wormholes.
These are normally found where there is an abundance of tachyon emissions.
Make a sensor for those and we can remove the wormholes and finally get rid of the worms.
QED
liqbase
What we need is a Zero Day Quantum Virus exploiting Quantum FireFox and maxing out the Universal Entropy Index.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?" Computer prints out "1337".
I was startled (though I shouldn't have been in retrospect, of course) to find out that quantum spin entanglement is NOT relativistically invariant. With a moving observer that boosts to a new reference frame, degree of entanglement actually changes. I've yet to see a full explanation of the implications of that for quantum computing, which always seems to be in the nonrelativistic approximation....
You see this is how it works:
You open up a quantum level black hole. Through this black hole, you send a virus. This virus can do anything: Set up a stock market account where some ancestor of yours buys XYZ company at $0.05/share, you can get pr0n of women who haven't mutated (unfortunately, by 2075, the ozone layer is gone and all of that solar radiation has mutated the human race.) The only way folks can mate now is to look at ancient pr0n!
Quantum malware will be a huge threat...as soon as we have the widespread adoption of quantum computers performing sensitive tasks. And people who understand how to program viruses for them. And quantum computers for the virus programmers.
Is this really even a story? We may as well be worrying about where to buy reliable crossbows once the atomic wars destroy civilization.
No fair! You changed the value of my bank account my looking at it.
I'd like to point out, vice Larry Niven, that when teleportation and faster-than-light drives are invented they will make new types of crime possible.
Not only that, but when immortality becomes possible, just think of the new pressures on the Earth's resources. Yet I'm going to bet those irresponsible doctor and medical researcher types haven't thought at all about this as they try to cure cancer and so forth.
You mean Wikipedia got something right?
Tomorrow on Slashdot: Is The Sun About to Kill Us All? It's not too early to think about it.
I'll bet that if your quantum antivirus knows you have a quantum virus it won't know what directory its in and if it knows the directory it won't know the name of the files to kill...
IANAPhysist. In fact, when the article began to spew forth quantum mechanics info, my eye began to develop a twitch and I started to drool.
:)
However, I am a self proclaimed computer geek. The main benefit of quantum computers, as I understand it, is an exponential leap in computing power and storage of such systems. If I understand correctly, a qubit can be altered by it's environment and change it's state, thus ruining it's data. I fail to see how this differs from computers today. Run a magnet over a hard drive enough times and good by data. Hard drives fail and lose data all the time, but we have sophisticated data checking algorythms designed to catch this kind of thing so that it doesn't get out of hand. It looks like they are doing something similar here.
I don't understand how one creates a worm with this either. If you know qubit for qubit, what data you want to change, then perhaps, but that requires knowing the qubits ahead of time, doesn't it? Same way with bits today. People create worms due to vulnerabilities within the hardware and software that they can program in. I know of no viruses which rewrite data specifically on their knowledge of ones and zeros.
Could a worm try to attack the physical nature of a quantum computer and run the data by physically attacking it? I don't know in quantum computers, but maybe that's what they are saying. The article is sufficiently arcane that it's difficult to see if it's just an attempt at fear mongering among us lessers, by saying "ooooo quantum computers are vulnerable to worms!" or if there is any real value to this article.
A quantum to english translator is needed
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
If I *know* it's got malware, I can't be sure if it's dead or alive...
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Actually, a quantum Norton Antivirus would be easy. Just write a quantum application that doesn't do anything.
Can anyone point me to some resources for me to learn more about quantum computing and especially quantum computational theory and algorithms?
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
My pr0n-collection has wormholed itself to another dimension :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition
I kinda wondered how somthing can be in two positions at once, then I thought about how the water in a toilet spins in different directions on either side of the earth.
So in a sense, we're basicly looking for a way to get smaller versions of us to flush their toilets when we want them to.
I guess looking at it like that, malware in quantum computing would be the turds in our toilets that clog them up.
We must ask the cats, as they have been observing the ways of traveling toilet water for years now.
Wasn't it the Egyptians that held cats sacred ?
Perhaps now we know the true reason.
All hail the cats ! For they shall lead us to the quantum promised land !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
*tries to look innocent*
coding is life
Simply find a parallel universe in which the quantum computer has already been rooted, and use that system to launch DDOU (Distributed Denial of Universe) attacks against the un-compromised quantum-entangled systems residing in nearby parallel universes.
How are you going to defend against that?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I thought I might have had enough money in my bank account to retire on but as soon as I got online to check it, my account dissapeared. :(
"As quantum networking takes off"...WTF? I like to imagine the future as well but come on...
The linked article on quantum networking talks about having to transfer a quantum state to a photon in order to transfer it, but it also says "...quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are...." Why not just make quantum networks that transfer using the quantum state directly. It would be faster-than-light networking, like the Ansible in Ender's Game.
... just don't look inside the box, whatever you do!
This is not the greatest
Wow...that was a silly article.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
"calculations on qubits"
Qubits?? What, are you stuck in the days of Noah? We live in the modern world now. All calulations are done in feet and inches. Get with the times.
There is nothing in the article about hacking quantum computers or networks, it just talks about errors in transmission.
Let's see if the random swapping of referees will save the scientific Journals from publishing this.
Pretty much everything New Scientist ever publishes is either full of misunderstandings or just plain wrong. This article looks to be up to their normal standards of anti-quality.
In other news, a new study shows that warp drive travel may not be as safe as other means of transportation such as cars or planes.
You just got troll'd!
The first link is basically about how if you're encoding quantum states onto photons and sending them down the line, then someone could theoretically scramble or block the communication by inserting a logic gate or polariser somewhere along that line.
How is this news? You can scramble regular classical communication by cutting the wires or "inserting a logic gate" into the communication process. Hell you can scramble semaphore by inserting a barn in the wrong place.
What, did the author think because it was all quantum-y it was going to be magically immune to something that amounts to cutting the wires between the two communicators?
There's nothing interesting, clever or new about stopping or scrambling encrypted communication. Now, if you can decrypt or decrypt-modify-reencrypt, then you're on to something.
Oh, and:
"In Wu and Lidar's anti-malware protocol, all the network members share a secret sequence of timings that tell them when the network is live, meaning they can operate their machines and share qubits between them, and when it is idle."
Right, so it basically slaps a "shared private key" system (with all the problems that brings with it) on top of a quantum-encrypted link. Again, what's all that new here?
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