Slashdot Mirror
NSA Trying To Build Quantum Computer
New submitter sumoinsanity writes "The Washington Post has disclosed that the NSA is trying to build a quantum computer for use in cracking modern encryption. Their work is part of a research project into tackling the toughest equipment, which received $79.7 million in total funding. Another article makes the case that the NSA's quantum computing efforts are both disturbing and reassuring. The reassuring part is that public key infrastructure is still OK when done properly, since the NSA is still working so hard to defeat it. It's also highly unlikely that the NSA has achieved significant progress without outside awareness or help. More disturbing is that it may simply be a matter of time before it fails, and our private messages are out there for all to see."
Bitcoin mining.
Ok, 2 words.
What they need is a bigger Faraday cage to keep the non-NSA snoops from disrupting their cubits.
It's a tool to help them justify congress how they can be spying on all Americans and not spying on any Americans at the same time.
Gee, I'm shocked.
For the peephole by the peephole.
That figure is so small vs total intelligence+defence budget that it'd be worth setting up a faux research effort just to give the misleading impression that they haven't yet developed something far better.
Come on... what's next? "NSA attempts to listen to other nation's communications"? That *is* their job, you know.
They've broken the law in letter and spirit. Let's try to keep the focus on that.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The disturbing part is not that the NSA might be able to listen to everyone's encryption someday. They are not an engineering organization and they will not be at the forefront of qubit manufacturing. The disturbing part is that they are wasting an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars on an impossible task aimed at ultimately destroying the ability to have security of any kind.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
NSA always will try to expand and it's stands to reason that the Chinese and their companies aren't under NSA sway, so the backdoors they build in are not under NSA control so the NSA has to try to crack them the hard way. In no way does it mean they don't have the US population under total surveillance.
Obviously, the NSA is having a hard time cracking the encryption because they haven't paid the creators enough dough to spill the beans.
"The reassuring part is that public key infrastructure is still OK when done properly, since the NSA is still working so hard to defeat it."
Unfortunately, 'when done properly' must include 'never using an American entity for key generation, storage, or distribution.' We have every reason to believe the NSA has muscled their way into possession of the master keys, Re: Lavabit. So if you're doing business with any type of PKI vendor who might be compelled to comply with a FISA court order, followed by a gag order, you might rethink it.
Remember when every browser in the world switched to the panic pages about a 'non-trusted' key?
Probably just a coincidence.
Moderators asleep at the wheel. Moderated flamebait? It's clearly a pun about quantum states. *sigh*
These are hardly shocking revelations. The document mentions to achieve control over two semiconductor qubits, whereas factoring 2048 bit numbers requires at least that many qubits, and probably several orders of magnitude more. The current record stands at control of 14 qubits, achieved in 2010 in Rainer Blatt's group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, using trapped ions.
Some time ago, I wrote something on the history and possible future of quantum computing. Moreover, one also has to keep in mind that there are public key cryptosystems that most likely cannot be cracked even with quantum computers.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
In *theory* they can match the values of an N bit code in one go where N is the number of quantum bits. In practice it might be another matter but even if not - that simply means you use more bits in your key. Once a quantum computer has used up all its bits it has to revert to working like a standard computer and doing everything serially. So if the quantum computer is N bits and we have a key with N + 32 bits the machine will still have to try 2^32 matches. So as quantum computer registers get larger so will encryption keys. Someone builds a 256 bit quantum computer? Great! So just use a 512 bit key and it'll have to do 2^256 comparisons. ie - it'll be damn slow.
Hey, no worries, hide messages in plain sight with no encryption!
They'd never think to look there!
Google is mainly returning all links to this story, but I seem to recall from at least 15 to 20 years ago when quantum computing became a popular issue, that cracking encryption keys was exactly the thing you'd use a quantum computer for. There was all this discussion of how many bits you should use for key generation, and how safe it would be ("It would take you the age of the Universe to crack 256 bits, even when harnessing all the computers on Earth, but a quantum computer could crack it in an hour" and stuff like that). It was no secret that the NSA was working on quantum computer technology then as well.
The NSA does all sorts of cutting-edge research in mathematics and computer sciences, so you can pretty much write a story that says "The NSA is working on a program to [insert futuristic computer-related topic]". Other than making for breathless headlines, is ANYONE surprised that they have a quantum computing program?
...and my colleagues called me crazy when I gave them 256GB USB drives full of true randomly generated one-time pads to use to decrypt my emails because I didn't trust public key.
Who's crazy now! Muhahaha! (posted from secret volcano lair)
It will be interesting when someone shows that they can factor 15 with a scalable algorithm.
Until then it's just a toy.
Surely it wouldn't be so easy for the NSA to get people to trust current systems as to just say they're building a quantum computer to crack those (because they can't otherwise)? Come on, that's an old trick. CIA pulled it on the Soviets, stealing a cypher machine to cover an agent who'd already provided the means of decrypting their messages, hoping the Soviets would stop investigating the agent. So the Soviets appeared to stop investigating.
Maybe the NSA can't crack some current codes, and is building a quantum computer to do so. But the converse isn't necessarily true. Maybe the US really couldn't read Soviet messages until CIA stole the machine (known as a "smoking bolt" operation, according to Tony Mendez). But I have trouble believing everyone in the KGB really bought that. James Jesus Angleton would not have.
Switch to ring learning-with-errors, which was proven by Regev to reduce in the average case to the hardness of some worst case integer lattice problems. Crypto systems built in this way are believed to not be affected by quantum computers and research is proceeding fast as a result. The fact that the NSA is no further ahead than anyone else is reassuring - we know how to build post-quantum crypto systems, the work that remains is largely in the "maturing" phase rather than the "wtf do we do now" phase.
Classic* public-key crypto (SSL, TLS, GPG, PGP) would be dead except, and this is quite interesting, except the one based on elliptic curves, which NSA has been advocating for for a long time.
Symmetric crypto (data at rest, file/disk encryption) would be affected, but not so badly. The key size would be halved. So Twofish with a 256-bit key would be as strong as Twofish with a 128-bit key (note that this means it would be 2^128 times easier to brute force, NOT twice as easy).
* By classic I mean DH and RSA-based.
They are a dinosaurian government agency, that has a habit of gobbling up money by the truckload. They have no reputation for technical or scientific excellence whatsoever. Neither do they have a track record in building first-rate equipment or software. Moreover, they have been proved, over and over again, to be pathological liars. In other words: who gives a shit ??
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I feel like the NSA would be remiss if they weren't investigating Quantum Computing. Breaking other people's encryption is completely in their remit. They could (and probably will) abuse the part about when & when it's *used*, but the simple fact that they're looking into it is not problematic to me.
Fact is, the NSA doesn't have a technology problem. They have a massive *targeting* problem. If they were using the technology they have *and* following the constitution, there would be no problems. But, blanket spying on everyone is not okay. That's the problem. Investigating quantum computing is totally fine for them to be doing. Using quantum computing to break everyone's keys in the entire world is not fine.
More disturbing is that it may simply be a matter of time before it fails, and our private messages are out there for all to see.
There is quite a bit of fearmongering here...
Given that they couldn't even secure their internal network properly, it would seem highly unlikely that the NSA has the commitment, expertise, or efficiency to secretly develop cutting edge technology far in excess of what the best academics in the world can do.
That said, instead of everyone standing around and wringing their hands, maybe now would be a good time to start developing more secure encryption algorithms that are more robust to brute force attacks. The encryption community has been resting on their laurels for quite a while now.
The NSA deserves a lot of criticism for some of the things they've been doing. However, this is the kind of thing they should be working on. It's not the tools they have that bothers me. It is how they use them that is the problem.
Proverbs 21:19
One of NSA's chief missions is breaking encryption. So (for the US folks among us) it's okay when it's the German or Japanese codes in WWII, but somehow sinister when the reality is that much of the world now shares the same tools, systems, services, networks, encryption standards, etc.?
In a free society governed by the rule of law, it is not the capability, but the law, that is paramount. And for all of the carping and hand-wringing about what NSA is doing because its capabilities continue to be laid bare, where is the worry about what states like China and Russia are doing?
The NSA is supposed to be working on cryptography technology.
The NSA needs to get back to doing its job, and stop spying on Americans. We already have several branches of government that are responsible for domestic criminal investigations, and they're subject (in theory anyway) to the robust safeguards in the Constitution.
The NSA helps everyone with robust cryptography. It's in nobody's best interest when one government can decipher everyone else's communications, except maybe for that handful of codebreakers.
Regardless of what they say, terrorists are low tech. They do not have access to a large pool of cryptography talent, nor will they ever.
This is why we need research into post-quantum cryptography.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
Information wants to be free!
I thought the disclosure of private information is to be lauded?
"Quantum Computing" is hogwash. I'll eat my shoe when they can crack even a tiny RSA key, say the smallest possible, faster than a conventional chip.
"Digital Fortress" wherein a rogue NSA cryptographer out to save and or destroy a 12-ton NSA codebreaking (quantum?) computer gets chased by a blind assassin for some reason... and a 64 BIT encryption key was pressed into a gold ring, but was somehow made up of 64 ascii characters.
Don't worry because (spoiler) the "enigma" or whatever melted down when a virus caused it to something something, not even the fat IT guy named Jabba was able to stop the awesome power of something something. I am not even joking.
Although since it is written from the point of view of an NSA "genius," I suppose the glaring errors make it a lot more realistic.
It's a government project. Eventually the contractors involved will screw the project up and they'll have to announce it in a secret meeting on the black budget. They'll then ask for billions more to develop a solution to a so-called quantum computer gap that exists with the Chinese and Russians. The Cold War with the Soviets may be over but we're in a new Cold War with BRIC and the stakes are more along the lines of economic vs. military.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
you don't know what you're talking about
Why should they trust those memory sticks you are giving them? After all, you might have gotten them from a manufacturer whose factory was hacked and the USB drives are silently corrupting data in random ways.
posted from secret volcano lair
Now I know you are either crazy or crazy like a fox. Since only a relatively small part of the Earth's surface has placed where you could put a volcano lair, I'm a lot closer to knowing where you are. Or maybe you are lying and crazy like a fox, in which case I say "well played, sir, well played."
If by chance you aren't on the Earth yet you still managed to pot to Slashdot, I say "VERY well played, sir, VERY well played."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yes, yes, yes. If they'd spend their money on this instead of invading American's privacy, maybe they'd be a few months further down the road than they are.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Once such a thing is achieved, can't it be duplicated and used for quantum encryption for everyone?
Technoli
Theres a world of difference between trying and succeeding. Still its not bad that money is pumped into quant computing research, someone is going to crack the problem sooner or later anyway, and it will cause problems for cryptography and security anyway. But cracking crypto is hardly the only thing you can do with practical quant computer, having one would literally mean quantum jump in engineering and science research. The boost it would give world of science greatly outweighs the risk of NSA cracking your porn archive open.
Has anything practical actually been demonstrated in the field of quantum computing yet? I understand that a lot of exciting and complex (if you're into that) math has gone into describing a model for how quantum computing should function, but as far as I'm aware nobody has actually managed to build any prototype devices yet.
When I first heard the term "quantum computing", I believed it to be a meaningless buzzword. I think at that time it may have been so. Now it is obviously a real concept, but unless I may be better informed, I think it is still a very long way off.
I wonder if programming for a quantum computer will be anything like programming for the digital (is that the proper term to use in contrast?) computers we have now. I can't help but feel that it would be both very different and rather more difficult.
And when they drag me into court for some conspiracy, I'll just cite Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and SchrÃdinger's cat as basis for reasonable doubt and get off scott free.
Have gnu, will travel.
out there to save us from the NSA?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
"The NSA May Or May Not Be Building A Quantum Computer That Can Decrypt Basically Anything" // www.seattlepi.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-NSA-May-Or-May-Not-Be-Building-A-Quantum-5111156.php
- http:
mark
That vastly increases the number of places he could be.
One NSA director in the 1960s said "I want a thousand-megacycle machine. I'll get you the money!" There's a book, "IBM's Early Computers", which shows much of NSA's exotic hardware from the 1950s through the early 1970s. High-density tape drives, the first automatic-changing tape library (TRACTOR), the first superscalar machine (STRETCH, which, for NSA, had a special crypto processor instead of an FPU), and a number of cyrogenic machines.
NSA tried hard to get cyrogenic computing to work, from the 1960s onward. They had some successes with getting devices to work fast in the 1960s, but the early superconducting devices were gated magnetically, which meant coils and discrite devices, not ICs. So they could be made fast, but not small, which means speed of light lag within the processor becomes a bottleneck. Mainstream CMOS IC technology eventually beat out the superconducting Josephson junction stuff on both price and speed. Some time in the 1980s, IBM and NSA gave up on that. It just wasn't a win over Moore's Law.
Quantum computing, though... Just maybe.
Once they develop quantum computing ( the technology to crack any code ), other countries
( and eventually all of us as the price comes down ) will be able to see what they, the congress,
and the senate are doing too.
Should be interesting.
If I have a crack for a current cryptosystem, I'd still need to build a machine to address the next cryptosystem.
Remember the panic in Britain when the (WW2) German submarine service switched from 3-rotor to 4-rotor Enigma machines! They hadn't finished a "bombe" got 4-rotor machines, and only broke the 4-rotor code when they captured an undamaged 4-rotor machine.
That failure was one of the reasons behind building "Colossus", the first electromechanical computer. Colossus was eventually able to decrypt message from the Lorenz SZ40/42 12-wheel machines, which were much harder than the 4-wheel enigma.
davecb@spamcop.net
The government can't even build a website and they are talking about quantum computing.
Its like the TSA terrorizing a 96 year old grandmother in Boise Int. Airport to stop a Saudi Arabian national with a Koran and a Bic on a bus in Riyadh.
Compared to the 600 million dollar initiative for the ACA website, this is a steal! Hopefully it works as well as the ACA website and we won't have to worry about them breaking any encryption.
What surprises me the most is that the poster forgot to say that the NSA isn't the only one in this race. Many nations allies and foes alike are in a race to decrypt each others information. Not to mention their citizens' data. First one to a computer that can break most encryption wins. The NSA is hardly the only kid on the block. That it is a quantum computer is just a detail point that matters little. The idea is to build a computer, any computer quantum or not, that can defeat the majority of encryption. The US isn't the only one who gets bothered by a lock it can't pick.
The NSA is both spying on you and NOT spying on you at the same time.
Government intelligence agencies have been involved in quantum computing research for ages. Just look at the funding agencies listed at the end of a typical research paper:
This research was funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through Army Research grant...
http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/papers/Wenner2013.pdf
Is it a surprise that they're doing work in house as well?
Hell even, Northrop Grumman (and possibly other big defense contractors) is trying to build quantum computers too, and it's not because they need quantum computers to design airplanes...
It's anything but a buzzword; it's a big research area with many academics working on it from all angles. However, you're right that it's nowhere near ready. As of a couple years ago, people had managed to factor 15 using a quantum computer; there are probably better records now, but it's tricky business.
The issue is that it's hard to make things both act quantum (being in controlled superpositions of more than one state) and be connected to other things. For example, atoms floating in a vacuum can act quantum for a long time, but they're hard to couple together. On the other end of the spectrum, superconducting qubits (made like microchips) are easy to couple together, but they don't act quantum for long.
Progress is being made, but it's a slow process. Short of some unforeseen breakthrough, it'll take a while to get a big quantum computer working, even though a lot of smart people are working on it.
I read a book about this a couple years ago, I think it was a David Baldacci. The govt. was working on figuring out quantam computing before everyone else, although in this case it was to figure out how they could defeat it once it was created for the purpose of keeping things secure.
That said, it explained for a layman how this sort of thing would blow encryption wide open, and there was a bit of a hint that of course the govt. could use this to break into everyone else's stuff too.
The NSA wasn't in charge of Obamacare...if they were you wouldn't even need to sign up, they could just figure out your selections for you.
Well Duh.. Of course they are trying to build a quantum computer. Haven't any of you read Tom Clancy's Net force series :)
Check out the Weekly rant..http://rabbit-trax.net/rant.php
We will be sure to believe it.
Remember if the msm are talking about plans they are really reporting on completions.
Hey, I told you not to look!
Personally I don't believe magical code breaking quantum computers are possible. News of NSA wasting millions on quantum computers means money not being spent spying on the world for benefit of US corporations.
The quantum computing fear is really nothing new.
It makes the current encryption scheme more valuable but there are post-quantum schemes as well as quantum cryptography as alternatives.
If I'm not mistaken, James Bamford was writing about this years ago. Nothing new here.
Let's not get lost here. We need and want the NSA to do it's legitimate job in protecting the nation against terrorists and people to whom the idea of "mass extinction" is just a shorter way to get their god to sort us all into our respective eternal bins.
The whole issue with the NSA eavesdropping is the potential for , as Snowden admirably put it, "turnkey tyranny". That's not nothing, that's not such an unlikely result of this kind of power being applied to the world's population that we don't have to worry about it. We do have to worry about it and we have to turn them back from the path they're on before it becomes more than a hypothetical worry.
But we WANT them to get a quantum computer and every other thing under the sun they can get. Yes, absolutely we do, even as we do the work that needs to be done to make sure our liberties stay intact.
It's pretty funny watching some of the same people who were hailing Alan Turing as a hero when the Brits finally pardoned him now act as if this is Evil Incarnate when it's what Turing would be working on if he were alive today.
The NSA wasn't in charge of Obamacare...if they were you wouldn't even need to sign up, they could just figure out your selections for you.
Not really, irrelevant of what you believe your selections are, they'll tell you what your selections will be.
Indeed, that sounds reassuring. But reassuring you would easily be worth 80 million to the NSA.
MC Frontalot - Secrets From the Future
I mean, we got lots of PQ cryptosystems already working, google for "post-quantum GPG".