This is a scratch of photons, which are particles of lights that are transmitted over long distance. Wikimedia Commons

A team of researchers, including Anne Broadbent from the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, have finally accomplished a breakthrough which makes information transferring completely safe for quantum computers using the principles of quantum mechanics. They named it blind quantum computing.

The risk of storing information on a shared server has always been a problem on Cloud servers (remote central server), until this team of researchers found a way to protect the information that is sent to the Cloud. Basically, with this technology, everyone is “blind” to the information except for the sender.

Broadbent, who co-invented the theoretical protocol that was used in the recent experiments, said in a UW news release, “It holds no matter what computational power we ascribe to the adversary attempting to spy on the communications.”

Security on quantum computers is hard, because quantum algorithms push mainstream cryptography protocols into danger. For example, Shor’s algorithm, a quantum algorithm for integer factorization, disables the use of RSA, a widely used algorithm for public-key cryptography.

Also, Grover’s algorithm, another quantum algorithm which is used for searching an unsorted database, reduces the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) security by half.

In addition, most mainstream cryptography protocols provide computational security that relies on the assumption that people spend limited time hacking and trying to solve unproven mathematical problems, although realistically, hackers don’t have the computational power to break these protocols, which requires more than a super computer. However, if one day an adversary has enough computational power and time, he can break any such cryptosystem.

With the blind quantum computing breakthrough, unconditional security is provided, which means that even with unlimited computational time and power, adversaries cannot break in.

How did they come up with a way to guarantee safety on quantum computers under these harsh conditions? In an experiment conducted in Vienna, data was encoded with photons, which are particles of light. Photons are transmittable over long distances and undecipherable to both eavesdroppers and the quantum computer itself.

Because of the unique features possessed by photons, quantum computers can operate much faster and more secure than digital computers that are currently used, although quantum computing is still highly theoretical.

Currently, most people use Cloud computing. Although blind computing has many advantages in its theoretical phase, it is highly demanded.

The problem is that, the security and privacy of Cloud computing heavily relies on the security mechanism and honesty of providers, because mainstream cloud computing providers have to have access to all information in plaintext in order to compute the result. This makes it inadvisable to use Cloud computing for sensitive information.

The cool thing about blind computers is that they can operate without knowing what they are processing. Because of this unique feature, blind computing is applicable to almost all kinds of data processing.

“When you think about it, it’s very highly improbable that it should be possible at all,” said Broadbent in the UW news release.

However, every invention comes with two sides. Blind quantum computer makes it impossible to censor users’ content because of its highly unhackable property.

What does this mean? With this technology, if any user publishes illegal content, the server is unable to detect it. Therefore, blind quantum computing would be illegal for civil usage under the proposed Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).

What is more, search engines are based on censorship from other sources. For instance, Google’s data mining is based on acquiring information from other sites and their own servers which store our data, and that’s why we can read content and advertisements that are relevant to us.

But blind quantum computing makes it impossible for website services like Google to access our data, which could potential reduce their revenues. Other than these minor concerns, the breakthrough really creates a new page in quantum computer research.

“I think this collaboration is a great example of a theoretical result providing a new direction to experimental research,” said Broadbent in the UW news release. “I think such interactions are very positive for the future of science.”