thanks so much for your presence and
your attention in recent years we’ve
moved so much of our lives from usual
physical space up to cyberspace we’ve
done so because it’s brought about so
many convenient and helpful
opportunities we’ve embraced this for so
many reasons it’s allowed us to do
things that previously weren’t even
imaginable and in the coming years we’re
going to embrace cyberspace even more in
ways we surely can’t even imagine today
this means however that cybersecurity
will pose an increasing threat to our
safety and security and while there’s
great enthusiasm to seize these new
opportunities the new business
opportunities and so on there isn’t it
isn’t as much fun or an exciting
business opportunity to make things safe
and because of this imbalance
it means our cyber systems will not be
threats to cyber security we don’t even
understand them today let alone the ones
that are coming and when you’re facing
such fast moving and changing threat
landscape what you need is sort of the
analogy of a strong immune system we
need a cyber immune system that’s able
to quickly recognize and adapt and
mitigate the new and evolving threats
but we don’t have anything close to that
what is surely for me the most
unexpected threat to cyber security when
I would never have anticipated was the
emergence of a new paradigm for physics
over a century ago so it’s helpful to
explain the difference between a new
paradigm for physics versus a new theory
invented within a paradigm for physics
new paradigm is like the Flat Earth
model for the world it’s a mathematical
model and then we we explore
the earth we discover new lands and
oceans and so on we measure things and
we we take pictures of them and we draw
them in this – or this two dimensional
Flat Earth model that we have and it
works fine for a while but as you know
as we start to discover more and more
things start to break down we get
paradoxes how could we have sailed west
and ended up in the east and you can try
really hard to come up with some pretty
harebrained
contorted explanations to make sense of
what you’re seeing but ultimately what
you need is not more precise
measurements and more discovering of
hard facts but you need a new
mathematical paradigm when you take the
knowledge you have and embed it in a
spherical model for the world the
paradoxes vanish you have a much deeper
or accurate understanding of what’s
going on around you and this new
understanding of the world also opened
up many new opportunities for Humanity
once we learn the earth was spherical so
quantum theory a century ago there were
a number of puzzles paradoxes things we
didn’t understand why is matter stable
because the calculations calculations
showed that atoms should only exist for
a tiny fraction of a second well that’s
not the case
why is atomic spectra discrete why
doesn’t the ultraviolet catastrophe
occur and so on and you know the problem
was that people thought well we just
need to try a little harder and we’ll
resolve those problems it turned out
what we needed was a new paradigm for
physics a new mathematical language for
physics the language we had at the time
allowed us to talk about an electron
being here or there or there or there
but that language wasn’t powerful enough
to resolve these paradoxes what we
needed was a language that allowed an
electron to be here and there at the
same time so what does that mean
so understanding what that means is
beyond the scope of this lecture it’s
actually beyond the scope of any lecture
I’ve ever given ok famous American
physicist and Nobel laureate Richard
Feynman said it’s a mystery we don’t
understand it but we can tell you how it
works
so this new mathematical paradigm allows
electron or any other particle to be in
many different configurations at the
so what does this have to do with
cybersecurity and computation so a
computer is a device that stores
information in a physical system usually
a two-state system that we call a bit
something that can store a 0 or a 1 it’s
two distinguishable States we label one
state zero the other state 1 the old
days these could have been a mechanical
switch up or down and in recent decades
transistors that can be on or off so we
have physical systems like this you know
one of these ions here could be a bit in
two distinguishable States and store
zero this one could store one zero zero
one for example but this bit if we take
advantage of the quantum paradigm the
quantum properties of this system can
actually be zero and one at the same
time with different quantum
probabilities of being in zero and one
and these five bits these five quantum
bits can be in 32 different states at
the same time all 0 0 0 0 1 and so on
all at the same time whatever that means
but in some meaningful way it really is
these 10 bits can be in a thousand and
twenty four states at the same time
these twenty bits can be in over a
million configurations at the same time
in thousands and millions and billions
of such quantum bits can be an
astronomically many configurations all
at the same time it’s mind-boggling this
opens up the possibility that such a
device could perhaps solve some problems
astronomically faster than we thought it
could in the classical paradigm for
physics here’s an example of a quantum
bit this is just a little loop of
superconducting material you can have
thousands of electrons going this way
that’s a zero
thousands of electrons flowing that way
that’s a one
and scientists have figured out how to
get these electrons to be going this way
or that way at the same time there’s
four of these quantum bits here and
these wiggly lines are ways that they
can interact and you can perform
computational logic and this is an ion
trap it’s again a mechanism for trapping
ions in a two-dimensional surface
essentially an instantiation of this
kind of vision okay so the quantum
paradigm for physics leads to a new
paradigm for computation the thing with
new paradigms is they’re very exciting
and wonderful in hindsight but at the
time we don’t really embrace them with
such enthusiasm typically it’s just
human nature that when something is
pushing us out of our comfort zone we
tend to look for all sorts of reasons
and explanations to ignore the
inconvenient truths we seem to be sort
of hardwired for policy-driven evidence
so to speak so this new paradigm offers
us many wonderful opportunities if we
can build these quantum computers for
example there are certain problems that
we can solve astronomically faster so if
we want to simulate quantum materials
design new quantum materials materials
that we can do it much faster with a
quantum computer so we can design for
example there’s the opportunity to
design new materials for much better
energy capture and energy transport or
the better design of new drugs or design
of new fertilizers and so on we can also
optimize the allocation the use of very
precious resources much better than we
ever thought was possible such as again
energy or algorithm algorithms for
scheduling and so on related quantum
technologies allow for ultra sensitive
and much less invasive measurements in
imaging and then medical imaging for
these are just a few examples that we
know of the truth of the matter is just
as the beginning of wireless
communication or of computation or of
the Internet in the early days of these
fundamental new discoveries we really
had almost no clue what the impact would
be on our lives completely incapable of
predicting and I believe that we really
have only scratched the surface of what
these new quantum technologies are going
to offer humanity and I very much look
forward to seeing what the new
generation discovers and brings to the
world there is one catch however one
tiny little detail we do need to think
about cyber security today now I’ll
connect to what computation has to do a
cyber security is based on a couple
things many things but one of them is
that certain problems are easy to do
it’s easy to multiply two numbers and
that’s good because it means we can
encrypt and decrypt our emails for
example very quickly without even
noticing it that’s good it also means
that certain it also appears as certain
problems are hard if I give you a large
number and I say well what are its prime
factors for a large enough number we
just it just takes forever to do that
that’s good because this is a problem if
a hacker could do that they could break
the codes based on this problem so the
fact that certain computational problems
are hard give us a way to protect
ourselves in a digital world and the
catch is that a colleague discovered
that Peter shor discovered that if you
could build a quantum computer factoring
actually becomes easy fortunately he
discovered it 20 years ago more than 20
years ago before quantum computers for
reality and there’s the large-scale
quantum computers still aren’t reality
so if we can build when we harness fully
harness to cut the power of quantum
mechanics for computation we’re going to
break some of the most fundamental
pillars of our cybersecurity
but that’s a very unpleasant thing to
have happen okay and it takes that the
fact of the matter is it takes many
years to fix these problems I mean I
believe so one approach is to say well
these quantum computers they’re never
going to happen in our lifetimes so we
can just ignore this but and that’s what
I thought
initially but that my supervisor
encouraged me to study this problem a
little more and then I realized I was
wrong and that I became very confident
that we would see large-scale quantum
computers while I was still in the
middle of my career and and currently
right now based on progress I’ve seen in
technology I believe there’s about a 50%
chance that these computers will be real
that we’ll be able to break these codes
by in about 15 years you might think ok
we have 15 years to worry about it not
know because it takes about 15 years to
fix the problem these are not easy
problems to fix these are long and
complicated tasks and the price of
procrastination isn’t just more frequent
cyber punch to the face we’re talking
about critical cyber systems collapsing
the internet financial payment systems
and so on true global catastrophes if we
do nothing so there are solutions like
we know what the solutions are at least
at a high level the first and most
obvious thing to do is find new
mathematical codes that we don’t think
can be broken by a quantum computer
there’s always a chance they will be so
there’s still that risk but essentially
we can recreate the status quo and have
sort of good enough security tools
cryptographic tools that will protect us
again with high probability against the
most likely attacks so we can sort of
recreate the status quo but maybe this
cyber threat was a blessing in disguise
because not only does it allow us we
have to all this work to recreate the
status quo but it also gives us
something extra quantum cryptography
another feature of the quantum paradigm
that didn’t
in the classical paradigm is that to
extract a little bit of information you
must disturb a little bit and the amount
of disturbance is proportional to how
much you extract so if you extract a
little bit more information
you must disturb proportionately more
and this is a requirement it’s not like
if you’re a little more clever or a
little more careful no this is just
fundamental by the laws of physics so we
have this intrinsic eavesdrop or defect
ability thanks to the quantum paradigm
this allows us to create a new
generation of cryptographic tools that
are cryptographically unbreakable and
these are a wonderful complement to
these other conventional tools that
provide maybe a more practical more
efficient good enough security and
together we can have a much stronger
cryptographic infrastructure than we
ever thought was imaginable and be much
safer in a cyber world the question is
are we going to deploy this new suite of
tools in time while there are many very
difficult science and technology
challenges to solving these problems I
don’t want to underestimate them for
example we have quantum cryptography
solutions on the order of a few hundred
kilometers but there’s a long way to go
before it’s a globally deployable
solution there’s a lot of work to be
done even to deploy the conventional
cryptographic alternatives it’s a lot of
work to be done but I have brilliant
colleagues all around the world
scientists and engineers who are ready
and keen to tackle those problems that I
have no doubt they will and I naively
used to think well once we communicate
this problem and the solutions the rest
will be details and then I very quickly
realized that those details are the
hardest part of the problem the hardest
part of the problem appears to be
getting the political decisions the
policy decisions the business decisions
and most importantly the personal
decisions needed to drive the necessary
changes to make the world more cyber
safe that appears to be hardest part so
like food safety car safety and so on
these are not driven by Marv
get forces alone and neither will cyber
safety experts have told me you know
until we have the cyber equivalent of
Pearl Harbor where many lives are lost
in a very visceral way we’re not really
going to have the emotional buy-in we’re
not going to have the necessary buy-in
to make the changes we need to make the
world a cyber safe as we know it could
and should be
well that worries me and I hope we can
bypass that that terrible step and find
ways to make the world safer without
first having this very much more
catastrophic event than we’ve witnessed
we can drive the necessary necessary
policy decisions and business decisions
how can we do that well for one we can
we can reject some of the the false
decisions or the false choices were
often told about so for example we’re
often given this impression that we must
choose between security and privacy or
freedom so we’re sort of like a
Heisenberg uncertainty principle okay
like to have this much security you have
to give up this much privacy that’s not
the case it’s it’s certainly possible
brilliant colleagues around the world
can develop tools that allow us to have
both analogously insecurity is not a
fundamental part there’s not a
fundamental requirement for being able
to embrace and enjoy what the next
generation of technologies offer it’s
just not a fundamental part of that so I
hope I’m optimistic that we’re able to
embrace the bright new future that these
new technologies offer and at the same
time live in a safer and freer world thanks very much for your attention