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How business could leap the quantum computing skills gap

  • min read
    • Chiswick Health Centre is a large brutalist building in London, UK. Along its snaking concrete entrance ramp, masked people form a socially distanced line. Inside, the open-plan waiting room has neat rows of prefabricated cubicles, and a COVID-19 vaccination nurse is doing his rounds. New drugs and latest findings in the life sciences have never been more important. Innovative techniques to help develop and distribute vaccines have been delivered in double-quick time. And if there are the people to do it, quantum computing could make the process even faster. Where are the quantum computing skills gaps? Although the latest quantum hardware, pioneered by the likes of IBM and Google, has a way to go, in a decade or two, we could even see the 'holy grail:' a universal quantum computer. Ilyas Khan, Founder of enterprise quantum solutions developers Cambridge Quantum Computing, says, "There are two clear sectors in quantum computing. First, the hardware and second, the software and algorithm discovery. There are severe skill shortages in software and algorithm discovery. On the hardware side, the issue is less pressing, but the engineering problem that must be solved is, of course, very hard." Fast growth in the quantum computing market Tech industry insights firm ReportLinker forecasts the quantum market will grow from 472 million to 1.7 billion US dollars between 2021 and 2026. And governments are backing it by investing in education and training. In 2018 US Congress passed the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQIA,) investing more than 1.2 billion US dollars in quantum research and development. The European Union launched its quantum computing flagship around the same time, with an expected budget of 1 billion Euro. China, Australia, Singapore and others are starting their own quantum initiatives. But what's all this got to do with developing and distributing medicines? Drug discovery leading the quantum market The field of medicine and biosciences searching for promising new medicines is called drug discovery. Here, the value of quantum algorithms is already evident. A 2020 poll of life sciences organizations showed almost a third (31 percent) were starting to look at how they could use quantum computing. A further 39 percent said they have quantum computing "on their radar" for 2021. Khan of Cambridge Quantum Computing says things like drug discovery can take many years using the most powerful classical computers. Although quantum computing is still early stage, "it's close to starting to match classical timescales," making it worthy of investment. Pharmaceutical companies are keen to get ahead in quantum. This January, drug discovery firm Boehringer Ingelheim achieved a first in its industry, announcing it was joining forces with Google in quantum computing. In a statement, the company said it would "invest significantly" in the coming years to realize the full potential of the technology. Boehringer Ingelheim has already set up a dedicated quantum lab, hiring "outstanding experts in the field of quantum computing from academia, industry and quantum providers." Talent is key: The poll of life science organizations previously mentioned found 28 percent thought missing skills were a potential barrier to progress. Specialist skills needed for a challenging technology Vincent Yam, Co-founder of AI and quantum computing recruitment agency Tekna Search, explains how niche quantum computing skills are compared with regular software development. "Most people have a Ph.D. in something quantum-related and a physics background, either at undergraduate or Master's level. Even then, two say, superconductivity specialists may have very different skills." Khan says, "Quantum information theorists tend to have physics, maths and computer science backgrounds. A small but growing number have also done graduate or postgraduate quantum information theory." Anticipating quantum skills shortages, investment bank JP Morgan started an internship program for quantum talent in 2020 for Master's or Ph.D. students. Universities are stepping up their programs too. Renowned institutions like the UK's University College London (UCL) and Duke University in the US have launched a Master's degree in quantum technology. Khan thinks there's still not enough investment in education. "The range of quantum computing graduate and postgraduate degree courses must increase substantially." Practical internships can nurture the talent pipeline While true quantum computing is some way off, quantum developments are coming thick and fast. These will impact many businesses in the not-too-distant future. The skills are so specialized and sophisticated that governments are putting their weight behind developing the best talent, and even then, education is falling short. Yam of Tekna Search says he keeps seeing the same top 10 global institutions in his recruitment efforts. This shows how small the pool is and suggests businesses should focus on getting talent early from best-in-class quantum research universities. Tech giant IBM is working to secure the best people early with an initiative aimed at high school students. Quantum computing could help tackle society's biggest problems. Its computational power could hasten our way out of the next pandemic, but it will need the best minds. Companies must think today about who those minds should be, and how to hire and develop them.
spacegraph interview

Shimmer, SPARKLE and digital toilets: The art and cybersecurity world of Lin Hsin Hsin

  • min read
    • As part of Kaspersky's Bring on the Future series, we meet people and businesses around the world who are changing the industry, and society, for the better. Lin Hsin Hsin is the Founder and CTO of SpaceGraph. She's an inventive technologist, artist, poet and composer from Singapore whose practice is deeply rooted in mathematics and information technology. In 1994, she established the Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum – the first virtual museum in the world. I met Lin at a recent cybersecurity conference, and we discussed the connections between cyber-tech and art in her work. Oleg: How did you become interested in cybersecurity? Lin Hsin Hsin: Cybersecurity is a discipline I'm hugely interested in. I specialize in threat intelligence. I'm particularly interested in new encryption methods and emerging technologies like blockchain and biometrics. I like exploring smart contracts too – these are an integral part of cryptocurrencies but they're not so 'smart' – they use weak programming language with flawed language design. I think of cybersecurity as a 'cat and mouse' game between the cybercriminals and the security experts. Can we beat them? Well said! Even more so at the enterprise level, incidents show that people are often the weakest link. All you need is a moment of lapsed attention and all your cautious preparation is rendered invalid. On the other hand, enterprises are constantly battling with insider threats too. Is it possible to have a quantum leap in cybersecurity? Well, yes, the deployment of data science and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) can propel us toward better solutions, but hackers are also using the same tools and processes to get ahead of the curve. Recently you created a series of artworks around Brexit. Will you create more art based on political themes? My Brexit Art Series consists of 50 digital artworks – it's now complete. Why 50? Because of Article 50! I even created a markup language <BREXML> based on the term 'Brexit.' You invented the first 100 percent Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) protocol, known as SpaceGraph, and you excel in using blockchain algorithms. What are your thoughts about using blockchain? I was the first person in the world to author the phenomenon of cryptocurrency, back in 1996. To date, there are only two protocols in existence, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The rest are either platforms or apps. The 10-year-old Bitcoin protocol is all about mining, where transactions are verified by peer-to-peer networking through cryptography and recorded in a public-distributed ledger called blockchain. Ethereum is a modified Bitcoin consensus via transaction-based state transitions. In June 2016, Ethereum and ĐAO (the related decentralized autonomous organization) was exploited due to several security vulnerabilities associated with ĐAO's smart contract software. It performed credible trackable, but irreversible, transactions without third parties to reduce transaction costs. Every transaction executed on Ethereum requires gas, defined as a fraction of an Ethereum token. There was a time when people thought blockchain was immutable. Now people have realized a few 51% attacks (blockchain attacks) do exist. Will these attacks persist? Yes, definitely. In May 2018, Bitcoin Gold – then the 26th-largest cryptocurrency – suffered a 51% attack. The malicious actor, who controlled a vast amount of Bitcoin Gold's hashpower, was able to double spend for several days, eventually stealing 18 million US dollars worth of Bitcoin Gold. More interestingly, it's the 34% attack, via the tangle – a distributed ledger fundamentally distinct from a blockchain, but designed to achieve similar goals – that could be more of a risk. It's called a '34% attack' because it would take just 34 percent of network hashing power to carry out the attack. You're a pioneer in both the IT industry and digital art. How do you imagine the future of digital art? We used to read physical copies of newspapers and books. How many people still have this habit? Book stores have converted to cafés for people to socialize, though most people are ordering a drink with their eyeballs glued to their mobile screen rather than interacting with another person! Will the advance of neuro-interfaces create artificial effects on our senses? Yes, these already exist. Recently, I invented some shimmering art for your pleasure! SPARKLE (Shimmering Pixels Assimilated Resistive Touchscreen Kindle iLuminated Emissions) is my latest invention. Will physical art survive? Archiving art is a nightmare because its materials always degenerate. It needs a great deal of space and preservation. Let me take you further on the journey. With the current capabilities of neuro-networks Generative Adversarial Network (GAN and deepGAN), the days of Hollywood's rule are numbered! Do we even need actors, cameras or production crew? I'm also a composer. I've recreated Western orchestral instruments from alternative sounds. For example, using the sound of water rippling, gushing and dripping, you can create the foundation of a sonic tone for a digital musical instrument. There's no difference in building a cat's meow or a dog's bark from this digital instrument. Don't you think something would be lost in the process? No! This is a replacement – there's no loss. New art and art forms can be created by harnessing the inherent properties of digital, like the internet and smartphone. I'm a huge admirer of the Bolshoi Ballet. The AI-assisted and sensor-based pointed shoes can be used to track a dancer's movements, training the dancer's skills to perfection. By measuring the dancer's exact body, it's also faster and better. Of course, robots could replace ballerinas very soon. How have you used virtual reality (VR) in your art? I started creating 3D art back in 1982. My first awareness of VR was in 1997, when I met the father of VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), Mark Pesces, in Los Angeles, USA. I started making VR art two years later, the same year I exhibited my first 3D printing work. I was the first person in the world to successfully use equations to create 3D design for sculptures, objects and jewelry. Fast-forward to 2011, I invented the first cardboard VR glass, three years before Google Cardboard! There's a lot of talk about digitization and tokenization in art, but people sometimes say viewing digitized art in cyberspace feels 'fake' and 'bland.' What's your view? Art was digitized about two decades ago! About the tokenization of art, I can't see the benefits because you must first filter out all the fakes, and that in itself is a mammoth task! I've delivered lectures on fake art, both fake non-digital art as well as fake digital art. Recently I created a method to make a digital canvas. It redefines the medium. If you use a physical bristle to draw an elephant on textured cloth or canvas, there will be two different impressions, so you will see two different elephants. I programmed a digital canvas to create this textured effect, to evoke a feeling. It's designed to make you feel better, compared to seeing the image with the factory default settings. It's like going to a concert hall to hear a concert and discussing the acoustics over a glass of wine in the intermission, compared to staying home and listening to the concert on your headphones. You're the first person I'm sharing this concept with! I'm delighted to hear about it! How do you see the future of utility tokens and cryptocurrency? Will the world adopt cryptocurrency as its preferred payment method? In all countries, the function of a central bank is to exercise control of the country's monetary system and policy. Central banks issue and regulate, limiting the circulation of the national currency. Other than security tokens and stable coins, cryptocurrency is decentralized and unregulated by financial policymakers, hence their objections to it. But several countries, like Luxembourg, Malta and Marshall Islands, have endorsed and adopted cryptocurrencies as their sovereign and legal tender. As cryptography is anonymous, it eases peer-to-peer transactions and facilitates instant currency exchanges. It's the rise of the truly 'cashless society.' It may even help to find solutions to debt. That would be a game-changer. What's your perspective on quantum computing? Unlike the existing computing world, quantum computing is based on qubits – sub-atomic bits such as electrons or photons. In cryptocurrency, quantum computers can break the elliptic curve cryptography efficiently in the two existing protocols, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Though not tested, it shouldn't affect the third protocol, SpaceGraph™ that I architected in 2018. A quantum computer can calculate the private key from a signature, although it may not be as useful, as there's no longer any credit on the address. In any case, it can also exercise powerful attacks on the RSA asymmetric key systems. Art vs technology: How do you share these disciplines in your life? There is no 'art.' I define ART as: Art Requires Technology Technology Redefines Art What are your hopes for the future? I'd like a future devoid of scams and fakes. About a year ago, I was attending a tech event. When I was waiting for our (human-made) coffee, I met a man who asked me what I did for work. I replied, "I'm an artist." He was shocked. "Why are you at a tech event? What else do you do?" I replied, "Cybersecurity." He became more puzzled and asked, "What's the connection?" I said, "The logic is very simple: cybersecurity prevents the theft of my digital IP." Eradicating plagiarism, fakes and lies is important to my future as a digital artist, and for the world of technology.
quantum computing

A new breed of encryption algorithms that quantum computers can’t yet beat

  • min read
    • With the quest to build a full-scale quantum computer now expanding beyond the science lab to encompass technology giants (such as IBM, Google, Microsoft) and quantum computing start-ups (including Rigetti, IonQ and 1Qubit), the race is on to create the hardware and software powering the next generation of computation. Quantum simulation looks set to revolutionize chemical and pharmaceutical companies. AI efforts could be enhanced with quantum machine learning, posing huge opportunities for businesses to optimize how they use their data. But as the charge towards a universal quantum computer starts to unlock these benefits for business and society as a whole, the threat to cybersecurity systems around the world looms larger. This is because quantum computers, once built up to their full potential, will have the ability to solve particular kinds of hard problems, and one of these problems is at the root of protecting the world's information. The excitement about the potential of quantum computers also brings worry about our current encryption methods. Quantum-powered codebreakers Many security systems protocols – such as RSA, Diffie-Hellman or Elliptic-Curve Cryptography – use public-key encryption techniques based on hard mathematical problems like integer factorization. They're the most popular and prevalent cryptographic algorithms due to their efficiencies, and they're the industry's precedent, built into early versions of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, for example. The power in the integer factorization problem, and thus the reliability of these methods for our standard security efforts, is that it simply takes conventional computers too long to compute the answer to break the encryption. Quantum computers, with their completely different architecture and theoretical ability to solve the famous Shor's algorithm, once built to their full-scale versions will be able to solve integer factorization problems at speed and put these pervasive conventional security methods at risk. No-one has come close to building a universal quantum computer capable of running Shor's algorithm, and so conventional security methods are safe from quantum computing right now. But standards organizations are on the hunt for the new quantum-safe algorithms right now, so they can be adopted globally across the industry in time for a future quantum revolution. The National Institute of Standards and Technology put out a call out to researchers in 2016 to submit post-quantum algorithms, and only this year narrowed it down to the final 26 candidates. They're still evaluating which should become the new standard. In some sense, this pace is understandable as there's no immediate rush right now – we are still far away from having a full-scale universal quantum computer. The most advanced versions released by universities and companies in 2019 are extremely nascent in comparison to what will be needed to crack Shor's. But on the other hand, no one can predict the future, and it's true that many of the finest mathematical, engineering and computer science minds are working hard to build quantum computers. To start the subsequent global rollout of the new algorithms, having the regulation and agreed standards in place should be a priority if companies and governments are not to be taken by surprise. Quantum-safe algorithm systems Quantum-safe algorithms need to be based on mathematical problems which are not only too difficult for conventional computers to solve in a reasonable time but also too tricky for quantum computers. Most of these algorithms can be grouped into three families of problems: lattice cryptosystems, code-based systems and multivariate systems. Lattice cryptosystems Lattice-based algorithms come from a core problem called the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP), which is about finding the smallest non-zero vector within the lattice. If you take a two-dimensional lattice (a grid of regularly spaced dots you could draw on a piece of paper) and draw a line from the bottom left-hand corner (zero) to a dot in the grid, you'll have a vector. Vectors can be combined using addition, subtraction and multiplication to traverse the lattice and find routes to other dots, in the process, creating new lines from the zero point to the new destination. The Shortest Vector Problem asks you to take a particular vector and work out how to multiply, add and subtract combinations of it to get to the dot closest to zero. This sounds like an easy enough problem to solve, particularly if you are working with a two-dimensional lattice, but as you add in multiple dimensions – there could be up to 10,000 – the problem quickly becomes too difficult for both conventional and quantum computers, making it a compelling candidate for quantum-safe cryptography. Code-based systems Code-base cryptosystems are based on a tough mathematical problem called syndrome decoding, which is linked to error correction. Codes for error-correcting are used to fix mistakes in the code, such as a 1 that should be a 0 or vice versa, which inevitably occur during transmission of digital messages. These are essentially secret decoding functions which only the person in possession of it can use to recover the original message, in the same way most forms of cryptography have worked throughout the ages: from Caesar's men running secret messages to the Roman battlefields where the generals already had in their possession the recipe to translate them from gibberish, to the secret decoding techniques of the German war communicators that Alan Turing's Enigma machine managed to crack. These error-correcting codes are usually used in situations where it would be cumbersome or costly to retransmit messages to work out where the errors are, for example, receiving data from faraway spacecraft, which can take hours to transmit back to Earth – not something you'd want to do many times. Instead, the error-correcting code is essentially baked into the message by deliberately creating 'errors', or scrambles of the original message, within. Without the recipe on the other end to decode this scrambled message, it's computationally too hard for both standard and quantum computers to reverse the errors and the encoding to crack the message. The most popular of these error-correcting codes is called a Goppa code, which could be a way to save security professionals from quantum-powered attacks. Multivariate systems The clue is in the name here, as these algorithms are based on the difficulty of solving systems of equations with multiple variables. If you remember trying to solve quadratic equations in high school – which only have two variables, say x and y – it soon becomes clear how difficult it can be to solve systems with three, ten or even hundreds of variables. The most promising systems include the creatively named Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV) scheme and the Rainbow scheme; these can be used for digital signatures, just two options among many in the quest to replace our current public-key methods. Future-proofing encryption standards The direction of quantum encryption practice isn't to find 'one quantum-safe algorithm to rule them all,' though. As the history of cryptography has shown us – from the ciphers used in the Spartan military to the Bletchley Park code-breakers in World War II – old methods become useless as researchers become smarter. The algorithms being put forward by mathematicians, cybersecurity researchers and quantum computing scientists as quantum-safe standards may, one day, be proven to be not so quantum-safe after all. The scientists of the future might find other ways to break these algorithms, just like Shor's has been found as a solution to break integer factorization. But the uncertainty about the future safety of these new algorithms doesn't remove the need to make our security standards tighter now based on our knowledge that quantum computing will pose a huge threat to current systems. As emerging technologies reach the market, we need to make standards stronger to enable innovators to make the most of these incredible new inventions, as opposed to feeling threatened and missing out on their potential to improve the state of the world. The cybersecurity industry must be comfortable questioning its confidence in existing methods. It must ensure the traditional, sometimes slow-moving institutions in charge of standards and regulations move more quickly. The industry cannot fall into the trap of assuming quantum computing is still too far away to be a threat to 'business as usual.' It's only all of the world's digital information that's at stake, after all. This article represents the personal opinion of the author. Article published in 2019.
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Secure Futures magazine is your go-to business guide for opinions, trends and insight into the world of technology and cybersecurity. We help your business to bring on the future. Brought to you by Kaspersky, the global cybersecurity experts.

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