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Category: encryption – Page 28

What’s New: Intel today announced that it has signed an agreement with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to perform in its Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program. The program aims to develop an accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). Microsoft is the key cloud ecosystem and homomorphic encryption partner leading the commercial adoption of the technology once developed by testing it in its cloud offerings, including Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft JEDI cloud, with the U.S. government. The multiyear program represents a cross-team effort across multiple Intel groups, including Intel Labs, the Design Engineering Group and the Data Platforms Group, to tackle “the final frontier” in data privacy, which is computing on fully encrypted data without access to decryption keys.

“Fully homomorphic encryption remains the holy grail in the quest to keep data secure while in use. Despite strong advances in trusted execution environments and other confidential computing technologies to protect data while at rest and in transit, data is unencrypted during computation, opening the possibility of potential attacks at this stage. This frequently inhibits our ability to fully share and extract the maximum value out of data. We are pleased to be chosen as a technology partner by DARPA and look forward to working with them as well as Microsoft to advance this next chapter in confidential computing and unlock the promise of fully homomorphic encryption for all.” – Rosario Cammarota, principal engineer, Intel Labs, and principal investigator, DARPA DPRIVE program

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A single “super photon” made up of many thousands of individual light particles: About ten years ago, researchers at the University of Bonn produced such an extreme aggregate state for the first time and presented a completely new light source. The state is called optical Bose-Einstein condensate and has captivated many physicists ever since, because this exotic world of light particles is home to its very own physical phenomena.

Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Martin Weitz, who discovered the super photon, and theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Johann Kroha have returned from their latest “expedition” into the quantum world with a very special observation. They report of a new, previously unknown phase transition in the optical Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a so-called overdamped phase. The results may in the long term be relevant for encrypted quantum communication. The study has been published in the journal Science.

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A “self-portrait” by humanoid robot Sophia, who “interpreted” a depiction of her own face, has sold at auction for over $688000.

A hand-painted “self-portrait” by the world-famous humanoid robot, Sophia, has sold at auction for over $688000.

The work, which saw Sophia “interpret” a depiction of her own face, was offered as a non-fungible token, or NFT, an encrypted digital signature that has revolutionized the art market in recent months.

Titled “Sophia Instantiation,” the image was created in collaboration with Andrea Bonaceto, an artist and partner at blockchain investment firm Eterna Capital. Bonaceto began the process by producing a brightly colored portrait of Sophia, which was processed by the robot’s neural networks. Sophia then painted an interpretation of the image.

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Privacy remains an issue, because artificial intelligence requires data to learn patterns and make decisions. But researchers are developing methods to use our data without actually seeing it — so-called federated learning, for example — or encrypt it in ways that currently can’t be hacked.

Many of us already live with artificial intelligence now, but researchers say interactions with the technology will become increasingly personalized.

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Quantum Encryption, Privacy Preservation, And Blockchains — Dr. Vipul Goyal, NTT Ltd. Cryptography & Information Security Labs

Dr Vipul Goyal is a senior scientist at NTT Research (a division of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, a telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.) and an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he is part of the Crypto group, the theory group, a core faculty at CyLab (CMU security and privacy institute) and the faculty advisor of CMU Blockchain Group.

Previously, Dr. Goyal was a researcher in the Cryptography and Complexity group at Microsoft Research, India.

Dr. Goyal received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Goyal is broadly interested in all areas of cryptography with a particular focus on the foundations of cryptography. Currently his research topics include secure multi-party computation, non-malleable cryptography, and foundations of blockchains.

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Quantum computing offers the promise of solutions to previously unsolvable problems, but in order to deliver on this promise, it will be necessary to preserve and manipulate information that is contained in the most delicate of resources: highly entangled quantum states. One thing that makes this so challenging is that quantum devices must be ensconced in an extreme environment in order to preserve quantum information, but signals must be sent to each qubit in order to manipulate this information—requiring, in essence, an information superhighway into this extreme environment. Both of these problems must, moreover, be solved at a scale far beyond that of present-day quantum device technology.

Microsoft’s David Reilly, leading a team of Microsoft and University of Sydney researchers, has developed a novel approach to the latter problem. Rather than employing a rack of room-temperature electronics to generate voltage pulses to control qubits in a special-purpose refrigerator whose base temperature is 20 times colder than interstellar space, they invented a control chip, dubbed Gooseberry, that sits next to the quantum device and operates in the extreme conditions prevalent at the base of the fridge. They’ve also developed a general-purpose cryo-compute core that operates at the slightly warmer temperatures comparable to that of interstellar space, which can be achieved by immersion in liquid Helium. This core performs the classical computations needed to determine the instructions that are sent to Gooseberry which, in turn, feeds voltage pulses to the qubits. These novel classical computing technologies solve the I/O nightmares associated with controlling thousands of qubits.

Quantum computing could impact chemistry, cryptography, and many more fields in game-changing ways. The building blocks of quantum computers are not just zeroes and ones but superpositions of zeroes and ones. These foundational units of quantum computation are known as qubits (short for quantum bits). Combining qubits into complex devices and manipulating them can open the door to solutions that would take lifetimes for even the most powerful classical computers.

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A small prototype of a drone-based quantum network has successfully relayed a quantum signal over a kilometer of free space.

The airwaves are chock full of “classical” information from cell phones, radio stations, and Wi-Fi hubs, but one day those waves could be carrying quantum encrypted messages or data input for a quantum computer. A new experiment has used a pair of hovering drones to dole out quantum information to two ground stations separated by 1 km [1]. This demonstration could lead to a drone-based quantum network that could be positioned—and easily repositioned—over a city or rural area.

Quantum communication promises fully secure message sharing. For example, two users could exchange encrypted messages using “entangled” photons, pairs of particles with a unique quantum-mechanical relationship. For every pair, one photon would be sent to each of the users, who would be alerted to any eavesdropping by a loss of entanglement between the photons. One of the most common methods for sending such quantum encrypted messages relies on optical fibers (see Viewpoint: Record Distance for Quantum Cryptography). But in fibers, a large fraction of the photons scatter before reaching their destination. More photons can survive if quantum information is transmitted through the atmosphere, as in the quantum link established using a Chinese satellite in 2018 (see Focus: Intercontinental, Quantum-Encrypted Messaging and Video). However, satellites are expensive and difficult to adapt to changing demands on the ground.

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They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner—so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite. The special feature of such materials is that they possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies. Researchers at the University of Bonn (Germany) have now used ultracold atoms to gain new insights into previously unknown quantum phenomena. They found out that the magnetic orders between two coupled thin films of atoms compete with each other. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Quantum systems realize very unique states of matter originating from the world of nanostructures. They facilitate a wide variety of new technological applications, e.g. contributing to secure data encryption, introducing ever smaller and faster technical devices and even enabling the development of a quantum computer. In the future, such a computer could solve problems which conventional computers cannot solve at all or only over a long period of time.

How unusual quantum phenomena arise is still far from being fully understood. To shed light on this, a team of physicists led by Prof. Michael Köhl at the Matter and Light for Quantum Computing Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn are using so-called quantum simulators, which mimic the interaction of several quantum particles—something that cannot be done with conventional methods. Even state-of-the-art computer models cannot calculate complex processes such as magnetism and electricity down to the last detail.

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