Your daily round-up of some of the other security stories in the news
Groupon grief – was it password reuse?
The Telegraph reports that crooks have hijacked a number of Groupon accounts and used them to purchase expensive items like games consoles, iPhones and holidays. Some victims have suffered thousands of pounds of losses.
Let’s say closer to 7yrs or less.
Whether quantum computing is 10 years away — or is already here — it promises to make current encryption methods obsolete, so enterprises need to start laying the groundwork for new encryption methods.
A quantum computer uses qubits instead of bits. A bit can be a zero or a one, but a qubit can be both simultaneously, which is weird and hard to program but once folks get it working, it has the potential to be significantly more powerful than any of today’s computers.
And it will make many of today’s public key algorithms obsolete, said Kevin Curran, IEEE senior member and a professor at the University of Ulster, where he heads up the Ambient Intelligence Research Group.
Researchers have developed a new type of light-enhancing optical cavity that is only 200 nanometers tall and 100 nanometers across. Their new nanoscale system represents a step toward brighter single-photon sources, which could help propel quantum-based encryption and a truly secure and future-proofed network.
Quantum encryption techniques, which are seen as likely to be central to future data encryption methods, use individual photons as an extremely secure way to encode data. A limitation of these techniques has been the ability to emit photons at high rates. “One of the most important figures of merit for single-photon sources is brightness—or collected photons per second—because the brighter it is, the more data you can transmit securely with quantum encryption,” said Yousif Kelaita, Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab, Stanford University, California.
In the journal Optical Materials Express, Kelaita and his colleagues show that their new nanocavity significantly increased the emission brightness of quantum dots—nanometer-scale semiconductor particles that can emit single photons.
Nice write up about why businesses need to worry about QC sooner v. later. Glad to see more spreading the word.
It’s coming sooner than you think.
By Greg Satell
Greg Satell is a popular writer, speaker and innovation advisor. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President – Strategy & Innovation at Moxie Interactive, a division of Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s leading marketing services organizations as well as Co-CEO of KP Media, a leading publisher of magazines and websites in Ukraine, including the newsmagazine Korrespondent and the web portal, Bigmir.
Quantum computing might be closer than we thought, thanks to a series of newly developed scientific methods. Furthermore, a new implementation of Shor’s algorithm increases the urgency of getting Bitcoin ready for the advent of quantum computing.
Also read: NIST Starts Developing Quantum-Resistant Cryptography Standards.
I believe we’re really looking at less than 10yrs given the speed of evolution of QC to date. Instead of two new QC discoveries each year to advance QC; we’re now seeing 2 new discoveries every 2 months now not to mention China and US advancements on networking and communications and scalable QC for devices which Google plans to release their QC device in 2017.
Quantum computers could bring about a quantum leap in processing power, with countless benefits for fields like data science and AI. But there’s also a dark side: this extra power will make it simple to crack the encryption keeping everything from our emails to our online banking secure.
A recent report from the Global Risk Institute predicted that there is a one in seven chance vital cryptography tools will be rendered useless by 2026, rising to a 50% chance by 2031. In the meantime, hackers and spies can hoover up data encrypted using current approaches and simply wait until quantum computers powerful enough to crack the code have been developed.
DAILY VIDEO: Microsoft Starts Quantum Computer Development Program; Cerber Ransomware Expands Database Encryption Attacks; IBM Debuts Watson Internet of Things Services Practice; and there’s more.
Today’s topics include Microsoft’s plan to build a Quantum computer, Trend Micro’s find that the Cerber malware is seeking out database files to encrypt and hold for ransom, IBM’s new Watson internet of things services for the automotive, electronics and insurance industries, and the release of the Microsoft Office Online Server update.
Microsoft is on a mission to build a quantum computer, and the company has appointed Todd Holmdahl to manage the project. Holmdahl is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum, a unit dedicated to turning the company’s quantum computing research into real-world products.
How does one prevent hacking from a QC system? Easy, on board to QC first before others do.
Quantum computers have the potential to perform calculations faster than ever possible before, inviting a significant rethink in how we approach cyber security.
Given the amount of research being ploughed into this area, we are likely to see a commercially viable machine in the near future, so cryptographers and the cyber security industry in general should work to have a clear view on the implications way ahead of that achievement.
Sure, But What Is Quantum Computing?
Every current computer — smartphones, laptops, smart TVs — manipulates binary digits (bits), and these bits can only have two values: “0” or “1”. (Note: bits are also used to quantify the strength of an encryption method e.g. 128-bit, 256-bit encryption… the more the better!) Quantum computers, however, use quantum bits (also known as “qubits”), where the value can be 0, 1 or both.
