Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Photo: Washington Post
In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks,
the US National Security Agency (NSA) is racing to build a computer that
could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking,
medical, business and government records around the world.
According to documents provided by
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden,
the effort to build "a cryptologically useful quantum computer" – a
machine exponentially faster than classical computers – is part of a
$US79.7 million ($89.5 million) research program called "Penetrating
Hard Targets". Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a
laboratory in College Park, Maryland, in the United States.
The US National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Photo: AP
The development of a quantum computer has
long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary
implications for fields such as medicine as well as for the NSA's
code-breaking mission. With such technology, all forms of public key
encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure websites
as well as the type used to protect state secrets.
Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated whether the
NSA's efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs.
Although the full extent of the agency's research remains unknown, the
documents provided by Snowden suggest the NSA is no closer to success
than others in the scientific community.
"It seems improbable that
the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody
knowing it," said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical
engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT).
The NSA appears to regard itself as running neck
and neck with quantum computing labs sponsored by the European Union
and the Swiss government, with steady progress but little prospect of an
immediate breakthrough.
"The geographic scope has narrowed from a
global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union (EU) and
Switzerland," one NSA document states.
Seth Lloyd, professor of
quantum mechanical engineering at MIT, said the NSA's focus is not
misplaced. "The EU and Switzerland have made significant advances over
the last decade and have caught up to the US in quantum computing
technology," he said.
The NSA declined to comment for this story.
The
documents, however, indicate that the agency carries out some of its
research in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are
designed to prevent electromagnetic energy from coming in or out. Those,
according to one brief description, are required "to keep delicate
quantum computing experiments running".
The basic principle
underlying quantum computing is known as "quantum superposition", the
idea that an object simultaneously exists in all states. A classical
computer uses binary bits, which are either zeroes or ones. A quantum
computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which are simultaneously zero and
one.
This seeming impossibility is part of the mystery that lies
at the heart of quantum theory, which even theoretical physicists say no
one completely understands.
"If you think you understand quantum
mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics," said the late Nobel
laureate Richard Feynman, who is widely regarded as a pioneer in quantum
computing.
Here's how it works, in theory: while a classical
computer, however fast, must do one calculation at a time, a quantum
computer can sometimes avoid having to make calculations that are
unnecessary to solving a problem. That allows it to home in on the
correct answer much more quickly and efficiently.
Quantum
computing is so difficult to attain because of the fragile nature of
such computers. In theory, the building blocks of such a computer might
include individual atoms, photons or electrons. To maintain the quantum
nature of the computer, these particles would need to be carefully
isolated from their external environments.
"Quantum computers are
extremely delicate, so if you don't protect them from their environment,
then the computation will be useless," said Daniel Lidar, a professor
of electrical engineering and the director of the Centre for Quantum
Information Science and Technology at the University of Southern
California.
A working quantum computer would open the door to
easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a
standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA
scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the
intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It
is commonly used in web browsers to secure financial transactions and in
encrypted emails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring
the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves
finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount
of time on a classical computer.
In 2009, computer scientists using classical methods were able to
discover the primes
within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of
computers to factor it. The scientists estimated it would take 1000
times longer to break a 1024-bit encryption key, which is commonly used
for online transactions.
A large-scale quantum computer, however,
could theoretically break a 1024-bit encryption much faster. Some
leading internet companies are moving to 2048-bit keys, but even those
are thought to be vulnerable to rapid decryption with a quantum
computer.
Quantum computers have many applications for today's
scientific community, including the creation of artificial intelligence.
But the NSA fears the implications for national security.
"The
application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens
to dramatically impact the US government's ability to both protect its
communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign
governments," according to an internal document provided by Snowden.
Experts
are not sure how feasible a quantum computer is in the near future. A
decade ago, some experts said developing a large quantum computer was
likely 10 to 100 years in the future. Five years ago, Lloyd said the
goal was at least 10 years away.
Last year, Jeff Forshaw, a professor at the University of Manchester, told Britain's
Guardian
newspaper, "It is probably too soon to speculate on when the first
full-scale quantum computer will be built but recent progress indicates
that there is every reason to be optimistic."
"I don't think we're
likely to have the type of quantum computer the NSA wants within at
least five years, in the absence of a significant breakthrough maybe
much longer," Lloyd said in a recent interview.
However, some
companies claim to already be producing small quantum computers. A
Canadian company, D-Wave Systems, says it has been making quantum
computers since 2009. In 2012, it sold a $US10 million version to
Google, NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, according
to reports.
That quantum computer, however, would never be useful for breaking public key encryption such as RSA.
"Even if everything they're claiming is correct, that computer, by its design, cannot run
Shor's algorithm,"
said Matthew Green, a research professor at the Johns Hopkins
Information Security Institute, referring to the algorithm that could be
used to break encryption such as RSA.
Experts believe one of the
largest hurdles to breaking encryption with a quantum computer is
building a computer with enough qubits, which is difficult given the
very fragile state of quantum computers. By the end of September, the
NSA expected to be able to have some basic building blocks, which it
described in a document as "dynamical decoupling and complete quantum
control on two semiconductor qubits".
"That's a great step, but it's a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer," Lloyd said.
A quantum computer capable of breaking cryptography would need hundreds or thousands more qubits than that.
The budget for the National Intelligence Program,
commonly referred to as the "black budget", details the "Penetrating
Hard Targets" project and noted that this step "will enable initial
scaling towards large systems in related and follow-on efforts".
Another
project, called the "Owning the Net", is using quantum research to
support the creation of new quantum-based attacks on encryptions such as
RSA, documents show.
"The irony of quantum computing," Lidar
said, "is that if you can imagine someone building a quantum computer
that can break encryption a few decades into the future, then you need
to be worried right now."
smh.com.au 3 Jan 2014
If this technology and its use was used by another company or country, then it would be declared as a 'terrorist' act, and the USA would invade and kill all civilians in the process, labeling them as terrorists.
How ironic, from a country that is the world's largest warmonger and 'paranoid' that every single human has to be spied upon as they could (read are) a potential threat, where the real threats to humanity come from within the government of the US.
The
psychotronics program, known in the US as "parapsychology", involves
unconventional research into mind control and remote influence - and was
funded by the government.
