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Regulatory efforts to protect data are making strides globally. Patient data is protected by law in the United States and elsewhere. In Europe the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guards personal data and recently led to a US $1.3 billion fine for Meta. You can even think of Apple’s App Store policies against data sharing as a kind of data-protection regulation.

“These are good constraints. These are constraints society wants,” says Michael Gao, founder and CEO of Fabric Cryptography, one of the startups developing FHE-accelerating chips. But privacy and confidentiality come at a cost: They can make it more difficult to track disease and do medical research, they potentially let some bad guys bank, and they can prevent the use of data needed to improve AI.

“Fully homomorphic encryption is an automated solution to get around legal and regulatory issues while still protecting privacy,” says Kurt Rohloff, CEO of Duality Technologies, in Hoboken, N.J., one of the companies developing FHE accelerator chips. His company’s FHE software is already helping financial firms check for fraud and preserving patient privacy in health care research.

No one knows who might get there first. The United States and China are considered the leaders in the field; many experts believe America still holds an edge.

As the race to master quantum computing continues, a scramble is on to protect critical data. Washington and its allies are working on new encryption standards known as post-quantum cryptography – essentially codes that are much harder to crack, even for a quantum computer. Beijing is trying to pioneer quantum communications networks, a technology theoretically impossible to hack, according to researchers. The scientist spearheading Beijing’s efforts has become a minor celebrity in China.

Quantum computing is radically different. Conventional computers process information as bits – either 1 or 0, and just one number at a time. Quantum computers process in quantum bits, or “qubits,” which can be 1, 0 or any number in between, all at the same time, which physicists say is an approximate way of describing a complex mathematical concept.

Years after Mark Zuckerberg said encrypted chats were coming to Messenger, it’s finally being enabled by default.

Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one chats and calls on Messenger, finally fulfilling a promise that’s been in the works for quite awhile.

The switch to default has been in the works for a long time.

Continue reading “Messenger is finally getting end-to-end encryption by default” »

It seems for every proponent for quantum computing there is also a detractor.

Given the amount of quantum computing investment, advancements, and activity, the industry is set for a dynamic change, similar to that caused by AI – increased performance, functionality, and intelligence. This also comes with the same challenges presented by AI, such as security, as outlined in the recent Quantum Safe Cryptography article. But just like AI, quantum computing is coming. You might say that quantum computing is where AI was in 2015, fascinating but not widely utilized. Fast forward just five years and AI was being integrated into almost every platform and application. In just five years, quantum computing could take computing and humanity to a new level of knowledge and understanding.

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Continue reading “Quantum Computing Is Coming Faster Than You Think” »

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a cryptographic tool that allows for the verification of validity between mutually untrusted parties without disclosing additional information. Non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZKP) is a variant of ZKP with the feature of not requiring multiple information exchanges. Therefore, NIZKP is widely used in the fields of digital signature, blockchain, and identity authentication.

Since it is difficult to implement a true random number generator, deterministic pseudorandom number algorithms are often used as a substitute. However, this method has potential security vulnerabilities. Therefore, how to obtain true random numbers has become the key to improving the security of NIZKP.

In a study published in PNAS, a research team led by Prof. Pan Jianwei and Prof. Zhang Qiang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the collaborators, realized a set of random number beacon public services with device-independent quantum random number generators as entropy sources and post-quantum cryptography as identity authentication.

Quantum advantage is the milestone the field of quantum computing is fervently working toward, where a quantum computer can solve problems that are beyond the reach of the most powerful non-quantum, or classical, computers.

Quantum refers to the scale of atoms and molecules where the laws of physics as we experience them break down and a different, counterintuitive set of laws apply. Quantum computers take advantage of these strange behaviors to solve problems.

Continue reading “Quantum Advantage: A Physicist Explains The Future of Computers” »

As connectivity continues to expand and the number of devices on a network with it, IoT’s ambition of creating a world of connected things grows. Yet, with pros, comes the cons, and the flip side of this is the growing security challenges that come with it too.

Security has been a perennial concern for IoT since it’s utilisation beyond its use for basic functions like tallying the stock levels of a soda machine. However, for something of such interest to the industry, plans for standardisation remain allusive. Instead, piece meal plans to ensure different elements of security, like zero trust for identity and access management for devices on a network, or network segmentation for containing breaches, are undertaken by different companies according to their needs.

Yet with the advancement of technology, things like quantum computing pose a risk to classic cryptography methods which, among other things, ensures data privacy is secure when being transferred from device to device or even to the Cloud.

Quantum advantage is the milestone the field of quantum computing is fervently working toward, where a quantum computer can solve problems that are beyond the reach of the most powerful non-quantum, or classical, computers.

Quantum refers to the scale of atoms and molecules where the laws of physics as we experience them break down and a different, counterintuitive set of laws apply. Quantum computers take advantage of these strange behaviors to solve problems.

Continue reading “What Is Quantum Advantage? A Quantum Computing Scientist Explains An Approaching Milestone Marking The Arrival Of Extremely Powerful Computers” »

Researchers around the world are working on a network which could connect quantum computers with one another over long distances. Andreas Reiserer, Professor of Quantum Networks at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), explains the challenges which have to be mastered and how atoms captured in crystals can help.

The idea is the same: We use today’s internet to connect computers with one another, while the quantum internet lets quantum computers communicate with one another. But in technical terms the quantum internet is much more complex. That’s why only smaller networks have been realized as yet.

There are two main applications: First of all, networking quantum computers makes it possible to increase their computing power; second, a quantum network will make absolutely interception-proof encryption of communication possible. But there are other applications as well, for example networking telescopes to achieve a previously impossible resolution in order to look into the depths of the universe, or the possibility of synchronizing atomic clocks around the world extremely precisely, making it possible to investigate completely new physical questions.