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.'

Comments

I don't see why this is a story

[chispito]

It's a news conference and they likely weren't prepared to field security questions. That doesn't mean the security is lacking. It just isn't what they were there to talk about.

Re:I don't see why this is a story

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Re:What you don't know can't hurt us ?

[chispito]

Ahhh well, just another phase in the evolution of NASA from a can do engineering organization, to a can't do political pork barrel.

What the hell are you talking about? Nobody used that phrase but you. Watch the video. He gives a reasonable answer, and then they try to steer the questioning to other topics so it doesn't get bogged down.

as a nasa scientist i can explain.

[nimbius]

As a scientist working with quantum computing I can explain exactly why we dont talk about security and quantum computing. Last month we executed a security benchmark against it, and unfortunely the act of measuring the system security managed to accidentally change the entire quantum computer into a loaf of artisinal bread. We worked hard to change it back, by attempting to measure how inseucure the device was, but in turn only managed to collapse the waveform and ended up with a loaf of bread that was also a quantum computer. Weve not been entirely truthful with the public about this in the past but we can assure you that once we assemble what our team is tentatively referring to as a wheel of quantum swiss and a quantum superposition of 3 kinds of smoked meat, this hamiltonian evolution of delicious cold cut should get us back to a regular quantum computer. security concerns so far are centered around penetration attacks, and keith on the second floor trying to use the quantum artisinal loaf for a peanut butter and banana (regular, not quantum) sandwich.

Not dealing with the real issue

[JoshuaZ]

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.