Getting Ready For The Quantum World - Jenny Potts

the world is full of secrets always have been knowledge is power over the years many methods have been used to hide information from prying eyes these methods generally - an encryption in turn readable codes that for cryptography is the art of writing or solving of codes in cryptography information is changed into an unreadable format it can't be read by anyone but the intended receiver the receiver will have a key in the form of instructions of how to in scramble the information and reveal the message oops sorry the world is also full of curiosity people who want to uncover its secrets returns acknowledge this advantage and the thing that sadly makes the world go round many for many of you I imagine a

specific word came to mind when I said like these curio givius people yes what can we do about them well as there are people out there looking to uncover these hidden messages this cutie industry needs to involved encryption methods things as they become vulnerable to exploitation we're at the beginning of a significant evolution in cryptography one for the history books we need to get ready for the quantum world there are two traditional types of encryption symmetric and asymmetric an asymmetric encryption uses one key to decrypt and the same key to encrypt data and samac a symmetric ink encryption uses different keys to encrypt and decrypt information and when I'll talk about today later on quantum which is

slightly different so averages mentions snitch symmetric encryption uses the same one key to decrypt and crypts information this requires something called a key exchange and result in in both individuals having the means to encrypt and decrypt messages to one another and the key turns the information into an unreadable format so that it can then be transmitted and then one received can be unscrambles to reveal the message that was initially fragments there are two types of symmetric encryption algorithms which Excel sorry there are two types of symmetric encryption algorithms Rock algorithms where information is sent in blocks and held in memory until it's all been delivered with with where it is then decrypted and strings where data

resides in strings and is decrypted as it is delivered symmetric encryption has been replaced by asymmetric cryptography in many scenarios however it still used for payment transactions proving the sender a message is who they say they are and random number generator the encryption can be tracked back to the Roman era where Julius Caesar used to send the secret messages and using a cipher the Caesar cipher is a shift cipher whereby each digit in a message is shifted by a set number in a fat direction this is the key so you send the information and then such that information you like the risk the recipient know this is how you decrypt the information so with this cipher as you can see the

places the alphabetical letters are changing so a shift of two and would mean shifters to in the four directions we mean my name Jenny and would have JT become al e become Jeannie and the company and again n become P and finally why would become a as it would go around the cipher there's one thing to note here this doesn't this doesn't solve any issues with cracking as if you have two letters are identical you will know in this however there are methods which will change letters to different letters even if they are the same so Jenny would become LG PPA not really sure how I'd say that and to decrypt you just go back the

opposite way two letters backwards so you're going to talk about a second example of symmetric encryption which I'm sure a lot of you already heard about the Enigma machine it was used by Germans to send secret messages during World War two it uses a method of encryption called polyalphabetic substitution cipher this is a cipher which uses at multiple alphabets where one letter is substituted for another letter which is n substituted for another and so on and here the diagram that depicts that quite nicely very complicated and for the time it was created very impressive and so I'm sure a lot of us who are aware of what happens are thinking but we managed to crack that well we as a Britain managed

to crack that and without sorry with the Polish and so the bombe machine was built to crack the Enigma codes it followed up on the work of Polish mathematicians and was successfully created by Alan Turing and his fellow code breakers Gordon welchman at Bletchley Park BOMs the 7-foot wide six foot six tall and weighed a literal ton the cheering bomb was made of the equivalent of 36 enigma machines it created it mimics the exact internal wiring of the german enigma and it worked by tracking almost 20,000 Potts possible positions before finding a match for each letter G will do will do remodel to 211 bomb machines were made and used at the same time and non-stop to attempt to crack

German codes and throughout that time other machines sorry I forgot the name of them were actually converted into bombs to only to aid with the decryption so the difference between the British bomb and the Polish bomb that I think is that it had one addition it used human logic using common sense the team at Bletchley Park were able to figure out a way to make the computations much much faster this was there when letter is encrypted it would never be encrypted to become itself and by taking that into account computations became much much faster another thing is that if there's a set phrase or set words that happens multiple times a day or even in every

message then that could be used to that could be used to make the Machine much faster and the one the Bletchley Park use was Heil Hitler every message was signed off with Heil Hitler and by taking this into account Bletchley Park were able to crack the code so asymmetric encryption uses two different keys one private and one public it came about as a solution to the issues associated with Keaton sorry with key exchange key exchange can be difficult insecure and even impossible so I was looking for visualizations for this and I quite liked the one of soil at paper becoming unraveled so it's quite easy to unravel the toilet paper but can you imagine try

and roll that back up to the exact well to be exactly how it was before it's almost impossible and that's how asymmetrical encryption works it uses the mathematical theories behind prime numbers to only to create not identical but mathematically related public and private keys that could be used as a pair to encrypt and decrypt information one common encryption methods that I actually used yesterday in my first session at you know at uni I have to set up an SSH key or get my get lab account at uni and I used RSA to do that so it's currently used and I'll go on to the future lab later on and but the RSA algorithm uses the premise that is

difficult to factorize a large number to keep information secure when generating a key pair two numbers where one number is a multiplication of two large primes ha-ah sorry when January's key pair two numbers where one is the multiplication of two large primes multiplied together to create the public key and the same two prime numbers and used to create the private key linear computers would take years to factorize a large number meaning that this method of encryption is incredibly secure currently did you see estimated that it would take longer than the age of the universe so far to break a digits at 2048 bits access our certificates which use of RSA they estimated the universe to be over one

sorry thirteen point seven six billion years old and they estimated that it would take longer than that again to break this encryption but what if there was a way to factorize large numbers that was fast at the lengths much faster I'll come on to that later first I want to talk about elliptic curve cryptography unlike RSA I'm not actually sure when it comes to the maths behind this I've been trying to read up on it and I'm struggling to get my head around it I'm going to be honest about that but what I can say is this elliptic curve cryptography relies on the basis of the and this is a quote difficulty of computing discrete logarithms in groups

of points of an elliptic curve defined over a finite field and that crow is from Microsoft cloud Bob blogs so similar to RSA where it's difficult to factorize large numbers it's also difficult to do that but once again what if I told you and what if I told you that is a way to unravel that that would take much less time or soon there will be this bringing on to quantum computers first of all what is a quantum computer a quantum computer is computer which stores information using the quantum states of subatomic particles they're going to make so many changes to the world as we know it they go in to revolutionize but first of all they can

a great security they're going to rebuild security they're going to change how banking works they're going to change how conversion of money works it's going to affect the stock everything is going to be affected by this change all we can do is try to be ready and take advantage of the advantages that brings so a quantum computer swords dicta in profits which the equivalent of a linear computers bits these rivets represent a 1 or 0 depending on their quantum property these could be polarization phase or position matter acts differently in the quantum level due to a phenomenon called superposition for bits contain note 1 and 0 simultaneously this can be visualized as a penny on its edge

side not on heads or tails on a graph with 1 and 0 on the axis so I might actually draw this so if I put one there 0 there this line right here the vector 1 and 0 so that would be how you would mathematically denote the superposition is a vector of the two just lie speed under action Prabhas difficult right his velocity and it could be quite difficult to get your head around rectus and so visualizing them in this way can really help another visualization I'm sure a lot of you know about Schrodinger's cat Erwin Schrodinger divides the hypothetical experiments in 1935 where cats are sealed in a box with vial of poison a hammer a radioactive sample and

a Geiger counter a Geiger counter measures radioactivity levels for those of you who aren't aware so the radioactive material has a 50/50 chance of setting off the Geiger counter in an hour so should it be detected the hammer would fall break there and break the vial of poison and kill the cat so without opening the box it's impossible to know if the cat is alive or dead so this is another different way to visualize superposition the ironic thing is that children are actually created this to prove that a cat happy in superposition however his experiment I hope he didn't actually do the experiment it's theoretical but this is being used worldwide to explain the superposition so another vector in the

quantum world is space-time so space-time is a mathematical model which fuses the three dimensions and the one dimension of time into sport into a four dimensional model of space-time it sounds impossible sounds like something out of Star Trek well yeah but if you look at some modern inventions mobile phones tablets touchscreens they were all on Star Trek before they became real life and the Creator the app Bob the creature the phenomenon the arc of the air drive actually was inspired by Star Trek so what is the Alpha B I Drive it's it's sorry the Alpha the air drive is mathematical proof that it's possible or could be possible to travel beyond the speed of light but in a different way

because it isn't actually the entity that is traveling but space-time moving around the entity the entity gets put in something called a warp bubble and the space head of a spacecraft would contract while space behind it expands this essentially the universe the matter the universe moving and not the spacecraft itself this means that in the future if this is actually possible space perhaps to be used that can ride the universe like a wave this is so what does this have to do with my talk seeing everything because I understood space-time before I understood superposition it's a perfect example of how matter acts differently in quantum space and it really helped to my understanding of superposition as fast

as it can be difficult to imagine so this helps any of you understand - spacer then great if not I'm sure this slide has been interesting enough that you don't mind the detour from quantum computing so the phenomenon of entanglement buying the density of a quantum sorry finds the density of a quantity of different particles together this means that something that happens to one will affect all the others so while a linear computer iterates through some until they get a success quantum computers consider all permutations of all possible numbers at the same time so how does it affect have an encryption methods and just the shout out here I'm not trying to say I'm a physicist I love

physics but I don't understand the maths and physics behind me perfectly so I'm not going to try and hand I do I'm going to give my back shot to help you understand it so Shor's algorithm uses entanglement to break RSA and e-easy see fast a lot faster than a linear computer words and one thing that's happening at the moment is that quantum computers are posing a threat to future information that stores but information that is currently stores because storing information is relatively cheap at the moment so different governments might be stockpiling encrypted data from other governments to save and decrypt at a later date and that's quite dangerous so this is why people need to start acting

now on making sure that encrypting masses are secure but how he's supposed to do that well commands that later so similarly to sure that rhythm Grover's algorithm also uses also uses entanglement theory to crack security however this one is with hashing it's going to take a lot lot more powerful computer to crack and hashing that it will do for RSA but it is still possible with the power for the next quantum computer and this means that while in the next couple of tens of years we're going to need to start worrying about encrypting data with asymmetrical encryption while we don't really need to worry about hashing just yet so how a cryptocurrency is going to be affected a

lot of people are thinking about this issue in the wrong way people are thinking that they go into a factory alone sorry and nanami unity of information sorry of senders and receivers however it's not going to affect that tool correct me if I'm wrong on that I'd love someone to explain to me so cryptocurrency as I imagine a lot of you know uses crypto wallets and these are protected by public private key encryption aka asymmetrical encryption

sorry and they're protected by AC natural encryption which means that with the introduction of quantum computing they will become vulnerable to exploitation so this means that it will be possible for hackers to access people's crypto wallets and make unauthorized transactions which then won't actually be able to be traps or trace map and the money won't be able to be you see sorry retrieved so the whole idea of crypto being anonymous that still remains the same it's just how we how we protects the crypto wallets is what needs to be changed so for anybody who doesn't understand how cryptocurrency works and just because I think this is a fantastic video I'm going to play a video by the

BBC that helps explain exactly what cryptocurrencies are when you want to buy something normally using your normal bank card this is what happens I give the card details to the shot the shot asks the bank if I'm good for the money the bank checks its records to see if I've got nothing on my if I do it let's the shop know it updates its records to show the movement of money from my accounts the shops now if you wanted to remain the bank format system these we can trust to keep those records and not alter the more or cheat in any way we'll just view rescue in fact I wouldn't trust any single person [Music]

the idea is you don't have essential record of transactions instead you distribute many many copies of this ledger around the world each owner of each copy records every transaction so to buy something using cryptocurrency I give the shop my details the shop asks all the bookkeepers if I'm good for the money the bookkeepers all check their records to see if I have enough if I do they tell the shop and then all update their records to show the movement and money so there's no way that a force transaction can make it in if I try to alter a ledger it won't match all of the other copies yes [Music] Oh on one of them at random will be

given a reward of some newly-created ransom this is how cryptocurrencies work and remember all of these bookkeepers all of these Ledger's they're not actually people their computers lots so I'm not actually sure if then if quantum computers will be able to be advantageous to making crypto currencies better that'll be a talk for another time if I managed to research into that but they need to change just like everything else does when Hanten he does come into into real-world situations so to recap so far current encryption methods of vulnerable to the possibilities that arise with the development of quantum computing this means that information secured with asymmetric encryption will become insecure and the different encryption methods is needed the development of

quantum computing means that an idea called quantum key distribution should be about by the time encryption methods such as RSA you need with a fin thankfully the Center for quantum technologies should a fantastic YouTube on video that's a video on YouTube and it doesn't have a sound wonders play it and talk through it because it perfectly depicts what I'm trying to explain the bb-8 post bb-8 for sorry certain Star Wars on the bb-8 floor protocol is a type of quantum key distribution that relies on quantum computing uses the quantum property of polarization to create a key that can be used to decrypt and encrypt information the quantum property polarization is one you should already be familiar with

think of Polaroid think of Polaroid glasses windscreens on car and the awkward moment when people buy glasses of polarized in the opposite way to their car and they can't see anything so [Music] here's the video light particles see known as photons are emitted polarized by a Polaroid filter the light is polarized in one or two ways at zero degrees which is horizontal concealing sky and 45 degrees which is half of a right angle and if the if the polarization of Bob's reading from Alex are the same as the results you getting from his own he keeps it otherwise he discards it and this is how they key is created this method is secure because of

a heinessen big uncertainty principle which states it is impossible to measure both the position and the momentum over the quantum state exactly this means that while Alice involved you know which results to remove Eve does not also by attempted to read the quantum states of a photon the eavesdropper would actually state actually change the state of it meaning that they would be a random error in the message this error would let Bob know that someone had attempted to eavesdrop on his analysis data transmission if the message is still readable with the errors then there is no need to rerun the quantum key generator if it is unreadable the process would be repeated and the data would be encrypted and sent

again so where are we currently with quantum computing it can all find quite scary that there is a possibility to decrypt the algorithms were using at the moment to keep all our private information secure and other than the fact that people are that governments are stockpiling data to encrypt scintillated dates most of us don't really have to worry about that and we can change with the time when the time comes around the idea is that with the idea is that with the evolution of quantum computing as the quantum computers become more powerful and quantum key cryptography will become more possible and it will and it will replace the current algorithms so the three shows that we don't really have

anything to worry at the moment we would need six thousand six hundred and eighteen Corvettes to use Grover's algorithm to break a to five six at the moment IBM have I think a 20 bits machine and they're testing a fifty bit machine sorry 20 quibec machine and the test and a 50-quid bit machine Intel has a 49 crivit machine and Google has a 72 crivit machine so they're quite for us and we're actually quite ahead because we already know what we need to replace these asymmetrical encryption up algorithms with actually going to take probably decades to need to start using quantum key distribution but don't quote me on that cut off an estimate so while the industry doesn't

have to worry about switching over to quantum cryptography for at least 10 years according to the register 10 years isn't a large amount of time intact one thing I've noticed about the tech industry is that people fall in love with technology from the past and they struggle to let go despite maintenance and security issues that may cause the change to quantum is one of the most significant changes in the history of technology while that's in my eyes and it's one that we can't ignore is going to break everything we know and understand and we're going to have to relearn in physics we write codes and we encrypt information that we thought would secure resistant changes futile

and once the end of the quantum age prime number based encryption methods will be - the 21st century is when everything changes and we have to be ready welcome to the quantum age

so I decided to do this talk because I absolutely love this topic not because I know what I'm talking about and not because I had any idea how to put the talk together so why did ideas talk I want to learn more about it and by showing other people what I know they can question what I'm saying and even prove me wrong and they can teach me I can share what I know and hopefully teach others and thought-provoking is good bringing something different to the table is good I like to think that well I'm not I'd like think but I think different leads to a lot of people and I feel that that gives me a bit of an edge

I might be able to understand some of the principles mentioned in this but I have the least common sense that you're ever see in a person and that's what makes me me so I actually only have a couple more slides and a bit short I think I'm coming up to 40 minutes so I could improvise a bit I could take a few questions and you'll wander oh I didn't I was wondering what you think about ground Sterling's view the your iPhone and current-year tripped over the Bing I I was wondering what your view on crown Sterling's new time-based quantum cryptography is you have grounds letting go I don't explain it okay I don't think that can

explain an iris anybody else have a question you make Jamie ask a question like attention okay okay to do a quick close so I say thanks so much Philistines is talk it's actually apart from a five minutes off I did at PyCon two weeks ago because I knew I was doing this today actually my first talk so I hope it's being good I hope it's been informative and I know I've been reading from my notes a lot and I apologize for that but so you guys did something to learn from and bring on next year hopefully thank you Thanks congratulations on your first tour