Search This Blog

Powered by Blogger.

Blog Archive

Labels

Showing posts with label Quantum computing. Show all posts

Here's How Quantum Computing can Help Safeguard the Future of AI Systems

 

Algorithms for artificial intelligence are rapidly entering our daily lives. Machine learning is already or soon will be the foundation of many systems that demand high levels of security. To name a few of these technologies, there are robotics, autonomous vehicles, banking, facial recognition, and military targeting software. 

This poses a crucial question: How resistant to hostile attacks are these machine learning algorithms? 

Security experts believe that incorporating quantum computing into machine learning models may produce fresh algorithms that are highly resistant to hostile attacks.

Data manipulation attacks' risks

For certain tasks, machine learning algorithms may be extremely precise and effective. They are very helpful for categorising and locating visual features. But they are also quite susceptible to data manipulation assaults, which can be very dangerous for security. 

There are various techniques to conduct data manipulation assaults, which require the very delicate alteration of image data. An attack could be conducted by introducing erroneous data into a dataset used to train an algorithm, causing it to pick up incorrect information. In situations where the AI system continues to train the underlying algorithms while in use, manipulated data can also be introduced during the testing phase (after training is complete). 

Even from the physical world, people are capable of committing such attacks. To trick a self-driving car's artificial intelligence into thinking a stop sign is a speed restriction sign, someone may apply a sticker to it. Or, soldiers may wear clothing on the front lines that would make them appear to be natural terrain features to AI-based drones. Attacks on data manipulation can have serious repercussions in any case.

For instance, a self-driving car may mistakenly believe there are no people on the road if it utilises a machine learning algorithm that has been compromised. In reality, there are people on the road.

What role quantum computing can play 

In this article, we discuss the potential development of secure algorithms known as quantum machine learning models through the integration of quantum computing with machine learning. In order to detect certain patterns in image data that are difficult to manipulate, these algorithms were painstakingly created to take advantage of unique quantum features. Resilient algorithms that are secure from even strong attacks would be the outcome. Furthermore, they wouldn't call for the pricey "adversarial training" that is currently required to train algorithms to fend off such assaults. Quantum machine learning may also provide quicker algorithmic training and higher feature accuracy.

So how would it function?

The smallest unit of data that modern classical computers can handle is called a "bit," which is stored and processed as binary digits. Bits are represented as binary numbers, specifically 0s and 1s, in traditional computers, which adhere to the principles of classical physics. On the other hand, quantum computing adheres to the same rules as quantum physics. Quantum bits, or qubits, are used in quantum computers to store and process information. Qubits can be simultaneously 0, 1, or both 0 and 1.

A quantum system is considered to be in a superposition state when it is simultaneously in several states. It is possible to create smart algorithms that take advantage of this property using quantum computers. Although employing quantum computing to protect machine learning models has tremendous potential advantages, it could potentially have drawbacks.

On the one hand, quantum machine learning models will offer vital security for a wide range of sensitive applications. Quantum computers, on the other hand, might be utilised to develop powerful adversarial attacks capable of readily misleading even the most advanced traditional machine learning models. Moving forward, we'll need to think carefully about the best ways to defend our systems; an attacker with early quantum computers would pose a substantial security risk. 

Obstacles to overcome

Due to constraints in the present generation of quantum processors, current research shows that quantum machine learning will be a few years away. 

Today's quantum computers are relatively small (fewer than 500 qubits) and have substantial error rates. flaws can occur for a variety of causes, including poor qubit manufacture, flaws in control circuitry, or information loss (referred to as "quantum decoherence") caused by interaction with the environment. 

Nonetheless, considerable progress in quantum hardware and software has been made in recent years. According to recent quantum hardware roadmaps, quantum devices built in the coming years are expected to include hundreds to thousands of qubits. 

These devices should be able to run sophisticated quantum machine learning models to help secure a wide range of sectors that rely on machine learning and AI tools. Governments and the commercial sector alike are increasing their investments in quantum technology around the world. 

This month, the Australian government unveiled the National Quantum Strategy, which aims to expand the country's quantum sector and commercialise quantum technology. According to the CSIRO, Australia's quantum sector might be valued A$2.2 billion by 2030.

ChatGPT's Effective Corporate Usage Might Eliminate Systemic Challenges

 

Today's AI is highly developed. Artificial intelligence combines disciplines that make an effort to essentially duplicate the capacity of the human brain to learn from experience and generate judgments based on that experience. Researchers utilize a variety of tactics to do this. In one paradigm, brute force is used, where the computer system cycles through all possible solutions to a problem until it finds the one that has been proven to be right.

"ChatGPT is really restricted, but good enough at some things to provide a misleading image of brilliance. It's a mistake to be depending on it for anything essential right now," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman when the software was first launched on November 30. 

According to Nicola Morini Bianzino, global chief technology officer at EY, there's presently no killer use case for ChatGPT in the industry which will significantly affect both the top and bottom lines. They projected that there will be an explosion of experimentation over the next six to twelve months, particularly after businesses are able to develop over the top of ChatGPT utilizing OpenAI's API.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies face several challenges, ranging from possible ethical implications to accuracy problems.

According to Bianzino, this possibility for generative AI's future will have a big impact on enterprise software since companies would have to start considering novel ways to organize data inside an enterprise that surpasses conventional analytics tools. The ways people access and use information inside the company will alter as ChatGPT and comparable tools advance and become more capable of being trained on an enterprise's data in a secure manner.

As per Bianzino, the creation of text and documentation will also require training and alignment to the appropriate ontology of the particular organization, as well as containment, storage, and control inside the enterprise. He stated that business executives, including the CTO and CIO, must be aware of these trends because, unlike quantum computing, which may not even be realized for another 10 to 15 years, the actual potential of generative AI may be realized within the next six to twelve months.

Decentralized peer-to-peer technology mixed with blockchain and smart contracts capabilities overcome the traditional challenges of privacy, traceability, trust, and security. By doing this, data owners can share insights from data without having to relocate or otherwise give up ownership of it.



Singapore Increases its Investment in Quantum Computing, to Keep Ahead of Security Risks

 

Singapore aims to improve its quantum computing capabilities through new initiatives to build necessary skill sets and quantum equipment. It emphasises the importance of doing so in order to keep encryption technology resilient and capable of withstanding "brute force" attacks. 

The Singapore government announced on Tuesday that it will set aside SG$23.5 million (17.09 million) to support three national platforms under its Quantum Engineering Programme (QEP) for a period of up to 3.5 years. The scheme is a component of the country's Research, Innovation, and Enterprise 2020 (RIE2020) strategy. 

Two of these platforms were presented today, including the National Quantum Computing Hub, which will pool knowledge and resources from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT), as well as local universities and research institutes, to strengthen key skill sets. 

Teams from CQT, the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), and the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) would seek to establish international collaborations and train new talent in order to address a skills shortage in the emerging industry. CQT and IHPC researchers would also create quantum computing hardware and middleware, with potential applications in finance, supply chain, and chemistry. 

The National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) would offer the supercomputing capacity required to design and train algorithms for usage on quantum computers. A second initiative, National Quantum Fabless Foundry, was launched to facilitate the micro and nano-fabrication of quantum devices in cleanrooms run by industrial partners. 

The platform, which would be hosted at A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, would aid in the creation of products in quantum computations, communication, and sensing. Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic Policies, Heng Swee Keat, stated in his address announcing the new efforts that the country needs to stay alert in the face of growing dangers. Heng compared cyber threats to a "cat and mouse game," saying that efforts were made to keep ahead of hostile actors who were always looking for new holes to attack. 

With the cyber world rapidly developing, he believes quantum technology has the potential to be a "game changer." "Strong encryption is key to the security of digital networks. The current encryption standard, AES 256, has held up, as few have the computing power to use brute force to break the encryption. But this could change with quantum computing," he cautioned. 

"For some cryptographic functions, the fastest quantum computer is more than 150 million times faster than the fastest supercomputer. Quantum computers can solve in minutes a problem which takes a supercomputer 10,000 years." 

This underscored the importance of quantum technology research, the minister said. "Our investment in quantum computing and quantum engineering is part of our approach of trying to anticipate the future and proactively shaping the future that we want." 

He said that as digitalisation increased, so did cyber concerns and that Singapore must continue to spend to keep ahead of possible threats. He went on to say that the fabless foundry will use the country's manufacturing skills to create quantum devices that would tackle "real-world difficulties" in collaboration with industry partners.

In the Future, Quantum Computing will Increase Cybersecurity Risks

 

While dealing with the immediate threat posed by hackers, US government officials are also planning for a longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted material now in the hopes of being able to decrypt it later. Quantum computers, which work in a totally different way than the conventional computers we use, pose a threat. They use quantum bits instead of regular bits made up of 1s and 0s, which can represent multiple values at the same time.

Quantum computers' complexity could make them significantly faster at specific tasks, allowing them to solve issues that are currently hard for modern machines to handle, such as cracking many of the encryption schemes used to safeguard sensitive data including personal, trade, and state secrets. 

“For all the dramatic advances offered by quantum computing, it could create a huge threat to the security of our data,” Terry Halvorsen, IBM’s general manager for client and solutions development in the Federal and Public market. “It offers the powerful potential to break certain types of cryptography that safeguards many critical communications." 

Despite the fact that quantum computers are still in their infancy, are extremely expensive, and are riddled with issues, officials say attempts to protect the country from this long-term threat must begin immediately. 

“The threat of a nation-state adversary getting a large quantum computer and being able to access your information is real,” says Dustin Moody, a mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “The threat is that they copy down your encrypted data and hold on to it until they have a quantum computer.” Faced with this "harvest now, decipher later" policy, officials are working to create and implement new encryption algorithms to protect secrets from a new breed of supercomputers. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, claims to be leading a long and challenging transition to post-quantum cryptography.

Quantum computers may be able to defeat asymmetric encryption systems based on integer factorization or discrete logarithms in a matter of seconds. Everyone, from financial services corporations to government organizations, is concerned about this. To protect electronic mortgage data, digital signatures may need to be secure for up to 30 years. 

Experts estimate that quantum computers will take a decade or more to achieve anything significant, but with money flowing into the field in both China and the United States, the race is on to make it happen—and to create better defenses against quantum attacks. According to Moody, who oversees NIST's research on post-quantum cryptography, the US has been sponsoring a contest through NIST since 2016 with the goal of producing the first quantum-computer-proof algorithms by 2024.

NSA Issues FAQs on Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Cryptography

 

As concerns regarding quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography are overtaking the forefront of cryptographic discussions, especially in areas associated with national defense, the National Security Agency (NSA) has published a document comprising of the most frequently asked questions about Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Cryptography, in which the agency studied the probable ramifications for national security in the event of the introduction of a "brave new world" far beyond the traditional computing domain. 

This 8-page report provides a summary of quantum computing, its connection with cryptography, the Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite, Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC), and the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), as well as forthcoming techniques and cryptography. 

With the advancements the competition for quantum computing also heats up, with a slew of players vying for quantum dominance via diverse, eccentric scientific inquiry avenues, the NSA document examines the possible security risks raised by the establishment of a “Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer” (CRQC). 

"NSA does not know when or even if a quantum computer of sufficient size and power to exploit public key cryptography (a CRQC) will exist," it stated. 

A CRQC is the emergence of a quantum-based supercomputer strong and sophisticated enough to bypass conventional encryption techniques developed for classical computing. Whereas these strategies are practically uncrackable with existing or even prospective supercomputers, a quantum computer does not abide by the same rules given the nature of the beast, as well as the superposition, asserts readily accessible to its computing unit, the qubit. 

Considering that governments and labs are striving to develop crypto-busting quantum computers, the NSA stated it was developing “quantum-resistant public key” algorithms for private suppliers to the US government to employ, as part of its Post-Quantum Standardization Effort, which has been in operation since 2016. 

The world depends on public cryptography for strong encryption, such as TLS and SSL, which underpins the HTTPS protocol and help to safeguard user browsing data against third-party spying. 

Eric Trexler, VP of global governments at security shop Forcepoint, told The Register: "Progress on quantum computers has been steadily made over the past few years, and while they may not ever replace our standard, classical computing, they are very effective at solving certain problems. This includes public-key asymmetric cryptography, one of the two different types of cryptosystems in use today." 

Consequently, an agency such as the NSA, which guarantees the security of the United States' technological infrastructure, must cope up with both current and future risks - as one would assume, updating organizations as large as an entire country's key government systems requires an incredible amount of time. 

The NSA wrote, in theory, quantum computers can perform some mathematical calculations tenfold quicker than traditional computers. Quantum computers use “qubits” instead of regular bits, which react and interact as per the laws of quantum mechanics. This quantum-physics-based characteristic might allow a reasonably large quantum computer to do precise mathematical calculations that would have been impossible for any conventional computer to execute. 

According to the NSA, "New cryptography can take 20 years or more to be fully deployed to all National Security Systems (NSS)". And as the agency writes in its document, "(...) a CRQC would be capable of undermining the widely deployed public key algorithms used for asymmetric key exchanges and digital signatures. National Security Systems (NSS) — systems that carry classified or otherwise sensitive military or intelligence information — use public-key cryptography as a critical component to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of national security information. Without effective mitigation, the impact of adversarial use of a quantum computer could be devastating to NSS and our nation, especially in cases where such information needs to be protected for many decades." 

In its document, the NSA rests the decision of which post-quantum cryptography would be deployed by the United States' national infrastructure solely on the shoulders of the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), which is "in the process of standardizing quantum-resistant public key in their Post-Quantum Standardization Effort, which started in 2016. This multi-year effort is analyzing a large variety of confidentiality and authentication algorithms for inclusion in future standards," the NSA says.