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Quantum Computer Security? NASA Doesn't Want To Talk About It (csoonline.com)
itwbennett writes: At a press event at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, the agency was keen to talk about the capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer. 'Engineers from NASA and Google are using it to research a whole new area of computing — one that's years from commercialization but could revolutionize the way computers solve complex problems,' writes Martyn Williams. But when questions turned to the system's security, a NASA moderator quickly shut things down [VIDEO], saying the topic was 'for later discussion at another time.'
I'm wondering if this fits in with this story about a quantum computing grant for IBM, as well: http://www.zdnet.com/article/i...
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It's simpler than that. Quantum computing in this scale is in the area of heavy research, with a huge blanket of unknown unknowns; security is about mapping out your known and unknown unknowns and turning them into known resolvable state. You can't discuss security in this field yet because you have to discuss how the system *does* behave and how to ensure it *reliably* follows that behavior in the face of any and all unknown input states.
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This doesn't really deal with the real issue, the fact that the vast majority of what D-Wave is doing is complete hype with a very tiny chance of having any practical impacts. It isn't even clear that the type of problems D-Wave's machines can handle are problems where we should expect any substantial speedup from quantum computers. D-Wave's latest attempt at claiming that their computers show noticeable speedup is less lacking than some of their previous claims, but still not at all impressive. See Scott Aaronson's blog post http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2535 where he notes that the D-Wave machine both doesn't give any apparent asymptotic speedup and is beaten by the best classical computers. The real question isn't security but why NASA is wasting money on this instead of more promising quantum computing research.