Quantum Computing at Room Temperature — Now a Reality!

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Jul 312012
 

Quantum Computing at Room Temperature — Now a Reality

TIME / Techland
by Matt Peckham
July 6, 2012
Georg Kucsko is a graduate student and one of the lead authors of a paper that describes a technique that could one day lead to the creation of a quantum computer at room temperature. Professor Mikhail Lukin (from left), Georg Kucsko, and Christian Latta are pictured looking at their lasers in the LISE Building at Harvard University.


You’ve read about the world’s first quantum network built from two atoms and one proton. You’ve heard about the quantum computer someone plonked inside a diamond to grapple with something called “quantum decoherence.” I mean, who hasn’t?

But it’s all crazy Futurama science, right? You’d need costly equipment capable of cooling those quantum bits (aka “qubits”) to about the temperature of outer space vacuum, which is to say near absolute zero (-459.67 F), to get even a primitive quantum computer working, wouldn’t you? Also: laser beams and mirrors and springs made of light?

(MORE: World’s First Quantum Network Built with Two Atoms, One Photon)

Maybe not. In fact, maybe all you need is a team of intrepid researchers and a little ingenuity to prod a qubit into controlled, quantifiable action without special cooling.

Like: a group of Harvard scientists, who’ve apparently managed to create qubits and get them to store information for nearly two seconds at ambient temperatures. Two seconds may not sound like much, but we’re talking about a timeframe that the researchers claim is six orders of magnitude greater than prior attempts.

 

Diamond Days

How’d they do it? With one of the world’s hardest materials, of course. Like the international team of scientists that recently fiddled with a tiny diamond chip to get qubits to perform rudimentary calculations, the Harvard research team, led by physics professor Mikhail Lukin, employed a custom-crafted diamond to create quantum bits that were able to store information for nearly two seconds, and — incredibly — do it at room temperature.

“What we’ve been able to achieve in terms of control is quite unprecedented,” said Lukin in a story by Harvard Gazette. “We have a qubit, at room temperature, that we can measure with very high efficiency and fidelity. We can encode data in it, and we can store it for a relatively long time. We believe this work is limited only by technical issues, so it looks feasible to increase the life span into the range of hours. At that point, a host of real-world applications become possible.”

Getting a quantum computer working is like pulling off the world’s least forgiving Cirque de Soleil act flawlessly. Quantum particles are susceptible to outside influence. Persuading them to store information, then measuring that information — much less at room temperature — involves Herculean feats of isolation and control, like using extremely expensive equipment to trap particles in a vacuum, then keeping them perfectly still (as in really-truly: no atomic motion at all) to lower their temperature to somewhere in the vicinity of absolute zero.

In addition to thermal issues, qubits are prone to decoherence, losing information quickly as they’re influenced by their environment, thus the basic quantum science notion that by simply measuring a particle’s state you’re interacting with it in a way that critically influences your results.

The Harvard team opted to create an ultra-pure, lab-manufactured diamond containing nitrogen-vacancies, or NVs — impurities at the atomic level that behave like atoms, allowing them to be controlled and their spin-orientation quantified.

The trouble with NVs is that they can’t hold data long enough to function as quantum computers. Carbon-13 atoms also present in the diamond, on the other hand, are much less easily influenced and prone to hanging around longer. But the trouble with them is that those same upsides make them much more difficult to measure and manipulate.

 

Pure Impurities

The solution? It turns out NVs and carbon-13 atoms interact in rather fascinating ways, such that the former can indicate the state of the latter. By measuring the NVs, in other words, the team was able to gauge the spin of the carbon-13 atoms at room temperatures. And by further isolating the NVs and carbon-13 atoms using lasers, the team was able to encode information in the carbon-13 atom’s spin and raise its coherence — the time it’s holding the data — from a millisecond to over two seconds.

Why bother at all, given the effort still involved to produce the crudest of quantum calculations? Because functional quantum computers would be unbelievably fast: They take the concept of classical systems, where information is factored sequentially in “ones” and “zeroes,” and can represent those states simultaneously, a typically weird-sounding, parallelistic quantum behavior known as “superposition.”

To give you a sense of what that means, physicist David Deutsch has said that while your desktop PC today might be processing a single computation at once in sequential fashion, a quantum computer could be crunching through a million simultaneously.

 

The World to Come

What would we do with functional quantum computers (you know, besides insert a metal prong in the back of our heads and play fisticuffs with a bunch of Hugo Weaving clones)?

Imagine “quantum cash” channeled through a financial system encrypted for security purposes at the quantum level, suggests Lukin. Or consider a topologically quantum network, where qubits facilitate high-speed, ultra-secure transactions.

“This research is an important step forward in research toward one day building a practical quantum computer,” said Georg Kucsko, another researcher on the Harvard team. “For the first time, we have a system that has a reasonable timescale for memory and simplicity, so this is now something we can pursue.”

 

The Harvard team’s research was recently published in the academic journal Science.

 

MORE: Meet the Quantum Computer Inside a Diamond — Does It Run ‘Forever’?

Direct Link: http://techland.time.com/2012/07/06/quantum-computing-at-room-temperature-now-a-reality/#ixzz22FRJPif5

At Defcon, Hackers Show How To Bypass Android Encryption

 Articles of Interest, Firearms, Weapons & Personal Safety, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, Social Media, Technology & Digital Security  Comments Off
Jul 282012
 

At Defcon, Hackers Show How To Bypass Android Encryption

 

All Things D
by Ina Fried
July 28, 2012

 

 

If you lose your Android phone, your data could find its way into the wrong hands, even if you have encryption turned on.

A pair of security researchers have found an easy way past the encryption on many Android phones.

The method isn’t a flaw in the Linux-based encryption system used in Android itself, but rather the fact that the passwords that protect the encryption tend to be rather weak.

That’s because Android uses the same password to decrypt the data on the phone as is used to unlock the device. People tend to use either short pin numbers, simple patterns or easy to remember words. As a result, the encryption is fairly easily broken through what is known as a brute force attack.

“The encryption is good but you are able to brute force it,” said Thomas Cannon, director of research and development for Chicago-based Viaforensics. Cannon highlighted the issue during a presentation at the Defcon hacker conference on Saturday.

Once unlocked, all the information in the user data partition is easily accessible.

An easy fix, Cannon told AllThingsD, is if Android were to incorporate two passwords–a strong one for decrypting a phone at boot-up and a simpler, easy-to-remember one for unlocking the device.

“You only boot up your phone once in a while,” Cannon said.

Not all Android devices are vulnerable, Cannon said. First of all, Android didn’t even support encrypted data until Android 3.0, so there’s nothing to crack on devices before then — a user’s data is already unencrypted. The technique also relies on either devices without what’s known as a unlocked bootloader or else ones that are easily unlocked.

 

Direct Link:  http://allthingsd.com/20120728/at-defcon-hackers-show-how-to-bypass-android-encryption/

E-mail Hacks – A Bigger Problem than you Think

 Articles of Interest, Crimes & Criminal Activity (Organized Crime, Narcotics, Predators, Cyber Crime, Cyber Stalking, UnSolved), Firearms, Weapons & Personal Safety, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, Social Media, Technology & Digital Security  Comments Off
Jul 282012
 

E-mail Hacks – A Bigger Problem than you Think

 

Security Week
By Alan Wlasuk
July 27, 2012

 

Last month was a good one for e-mail hackers. I received 13 odd-product e-mails from 12 friends and my wife (long story), and Yahoo gave up more than 400,000 e-mail addresses to a hacker who subsequently shared them with the world.

I sent what I thought was an amusing e-mail back to my friends and wife and wondered how an IT juggernaut like Yahoo could be so dumb. After the Yahoo fiasco, my friends and wife changed their e-mail passwords and Yahoo hired a new $42 million-a-year CEO. Their hearts are pure, but as you will see, a lot more was going on just below the surface than most people realize.

 

Protecting Email Accounts from Hackers

 

However worrisome these e-mail hacks may have been, the public just hasn’t sent up a real outcry to put a stop to these hackers. Like the chloride in our water and the radioactive cans of tuna on our store shelves, we Americans just accept such risks as hacked e-mail accounts as part of our daily lives. I guess you have to die of something (a feeble attempt at humor).

Let’s look at what e-mail hacking is really all about and why it could be much more painful than just having to sort through our spouse’s energy drink messages.

We’ll start with how our e-mail accounts get hacked, and then move to the personal and financial issues that stem from these hacks. Finally, we’ll touch on how to avoid your very own e-mail hack and what to do if you do get hacked.

 

A Little Clarity

Before we dive in – let’s look inside an e-mail hack.

Older readers may remember when the Internet was young and a bad e-mail experience was having your e-mail address (just the address, mind you) added to someone’s mailing list and sold to hundreds of spammers. We received endless emails that clogged our accounts, with no easy way to stop this electronic spam. How annoying.

Life is better now in that the majority of spam gets trashed before we ever see it. Let’s hear it for the Junk folder!

Fun fact –  According to Symantec, about 40 billion spam e-mails went out per day in 2011.

It’s a new age now, and the $32 billion U.S. cyber-crime industry is far more sophisticated. The e-mail hack of today includes – our email address and the password that goes with it. At best, some cyber-creep has full access to our private e-mail correspondence.

 

Dumb and Trusting

Today, the only thing we should have to worry about is keeping your password safe: Relax and assume your e-mail address will be harvested the first time you create an Internet account, but don’t lose sleep over it because you have a secure password.

E-mail accounts get hacked in many ways – some because of what I call “personal dumb” and some due to “corporate dumb.”

 

I see three major cases of e-mail dumb:

 

• Bad Choices –

Americans are lazy, and we whine when we have to work too hard to protect our own interests. Given that chance, we’ll use passwords that are embarrassingly easy to guess. Common bad choices include ‘12345’, ‘qwerty’ and ‘love’. When pushed (or required) for something more complex, we will use our dog’s name and birth year (ginger2001) or ‘Password1’ (after all, this is more than seven characters and contains a capital letter and a number, right?). In truth, having no password at all would be just as effective as these. Hackers have automated programs that will crack these common passwords in minutes.

 

Email Security Tips•

 

• Undeserved Trust –

We seem to have a mistaken impression that any company with an Internet presence must be smart and trustworthy enough to keep our personal information private. However good this makes us feel, it cannot be further from the truth. We live in a time when the FBI, CIA, Zappos and Yahoo (to name just a few recent cyber failures) get hacked. These guys have million-dollar security budgets! Instead, you should start every Internet day with the assumption that everything shared may end up in a far-away cyber-crime lab. Your e-mail addresses and associated passwords are no exception.

 

• Malware –

Studies have shown that more than 50% of all home computers have some form of malware installed. We used to call these silent background programs “viruses,” but in fact, the term “malware” (malicious software) is a far better name for software whose sole purpose is to send out spam (where did you think spam came from?), threaten large companies with attacks (yes, your home computer may unwittingly have been one of the many that helped bring down the CIA website), and collect and report your every keystroke. A resident malware program hanging out on your home PC would have no problem collecting your Yahoo, Hotmail of Gmail login credentials.

 

* The Real Danger

OK, your e-mail account gets hacked and sends out questionable product e-mail ads to friends and relatives across the nation. This is not a big deal anymore; most people have seen so many of these, they probably won’t even bother to poke fun at you.

 

You change your passwords and assume all is well. Unfortunately, all may not be well. Your problems may just be starting. To get you thinking, I’ve picked out a few of the secondary problems you may encounter:

 

• One Password for All –

Studies have shown that more than 60% of all Internet users use one, at most three, login name/password pairs throughout their entire Internet journey. This means that a hacker who discovers your favorite password may have access to all of your Internet accounts. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the hacker’s next stop, after discovering your e-mail password, will be PayPal, eBay and every online banking site in the country. Your e-mail address and password will be checked against thousands of eCommerce and financial sites in minutes.

 

• Identity Theft and Extortion –

A hacker gaining access to your personal e-mail account is like your kid brother reading your diary – those e-mails are supposed to be private. Imagine the information you’ve sent to friends and family being read by an automated program that has been trained to pick out information that can be used in an identity theft or to gain access to financial accounts. Then consider the very, very private e-mails that you’d gladly pay someone to keep private. Cyber-extortion is alive and well as a thriving industry here in the U.S. At least with your kid brother, you had the option of blackmailing him.

 

• It’s not just You at Risk –

At the very least, your hacked e-mail account provided a hacker with your entire list of contacts. Your friends, family, coworkers and colleagues will get added to Spam and ‘Try to Hack’ lists across the world. You also might think about the e-mail messages you’ve received from friends that include their identity information or that might put them at risk of cyber extortion. We all do tend to be a bit indiscrete with our e-mails.

 

• Supporting a Hacker –

Feeling bad about the colon cleansing product you just unwittingly promoted (spam e-mails from friends and relatives are likely to be opened) is fine. What should make you really mad, however, is that every one of those spam e-mails that get opened makes a small profit for the hacker – the old pay-per-click system at work. The free market system is alive and well in cyberspace.

 

* Taking Control of your E-mail Life

Let’s start by saying that even with your best efforts, your e-mail account may get hacked. Cyber-crime is big business and even the big e-mail providers like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google eventually will fall prey to persistent and well-funded hackers. Even if you are playing life safe personally, “corporate dumb” is well within your computer’s reach.

 

Having said that, however, you really should do your part to avoid being the next e-mail casualty. My suggestions for you:

 

• Stave off Malware –

Common Malware is often avoidable. Install a quality anti-virus/malware product (well worth the small extra cost) and keep it current. Then make sure your operating systems and browsers are likewise current.

 

• Stay Password Safe –

Choose your passwords with care; make them strong (long and complex) and try not to use the same password twice. As a compromise to password sanity, the least you should do is separate your passwords usage into financial, personal and casual buckets. For example, your PayPal password should never be the same as your Yahoo password.

 

• Tread the Internet with Care –

The Internet is a mean place. Treat every e-mail like a Trojan horse, every web page as a potential source of malware, and request to set up a private account and a trick to harvest your password.

 

• Use Two-Factor Authentication –

Adding an additional security layer to your account such as two-factor authenication can be a significant enchancement and protect your account even if your password was compromised. Google, for example, provides two-factor authentication to protect email and Google accounts from hackers.

 

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