Cyber Citadel
Topics: Algorithms, Cipher, Quantum computing
Transcript Excerpt
Despite the contradictions and concerns surrounding the development of quantum computing, Rafay Balogh, Cyber Citadel Lead Security Researcher, stated that quantum computing has a bright prospect. Baloch elaborated on the argument by giving a few applications of quantum computing.
Quantum computing can make processes such as machine learning more effective. With machine learning, a large amount of data subsets and processing is required in which quantum computing can contribute. Quantum computing would then be beneficial in fields such as cryptography which requires large processing speed and data analysis.
Balogh then continued by an explanation of how quantum computing works. While normal digital computers can only exist in either zero or one, quantum computing can exist in zero and one simultaneously, thus having multiple states. As an analogy, quantum computing is like having simultaneously spinning coins whereas normal digital computers can only spin a coin at a time. The states of quantum computing, represented by what is called a qubit, can be expanded with how these qubits can be “entangled” in such a way that they can coexist – with one qubit being capable of representing two states, two qubits representing four, and so on.
This situation would allow the user with large processing speed, which would be catastrophic in an unlikely event where security breachers managed to replicate a quantum computing model before the government did. Although Balogh described that this scenario would allow unwanted situations like password cracking and other forms of quantum attacks, research on developing new post quantum algorithms is currently in process. Furthermore, certain algorithms, such as AES 256, are acknowledged by most members of the cyber security community to be resistant against quantum attacks. AES, as described in the video, is a symmetric key cipher. This cipher comes in three bit sizes, and AES 256, as the cipher with the highest bit, provides the most secure encryption among the available bits. This encryption, according to Balogh, will prove difficult to be bypassed by the attackers.
Balogh further commented that algorithms like AES 128 are going to potentially leave an impact especially on asymmetric algorithms which would require further updates on their own. In cryptography, for example, RSA (Rivest-Shadir-Adleman) is relatively slow and still relying on discrete logarithm.
Balogh ended the video with a hopeful note by reassuring that research is still ongoing, and he wished that in the future quantum computers would be available to the public as the new and better standards.
