The future is here. Or just about. After a number of discoveries, researchers have proven that quantum computing is possible and on its way. The wider world did not pause long on this discovery: Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Google, and IBM have just announced their own intentions to embark on their own quantum developments.

Now that its within our reach we have to start seriously considering what that means in the real world. Certainly, we all stand to gain from the massive benefits that quantum capabilities can bring, but so do cybercriminals.

Scalable quantum computing will defeat much of modern-day encryption, such as the RSA 2048 bit keys, which secure computer networks everywhere. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology says as much, projecting that quantum in this decade will be able to break the protocols on which the modern internet relies.

The security profession hasnt taken the news lying down either. Preparations have begun in earnest. The DigiCert 2019 Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Survey aimed to examine exactly how companies were doing. Researchers surveyed 400 enterprises, each with 1,000 or more employees, across the US, Germany and Japan to get answers. They also conducted a focus group of nine different IT managers to further reveal those preparations.

SEE ALSO:DevSecOps Panel Best DevOps Security Practices & Best Tools

An encouraging development is that 35 percent of respondents already have a PQC budget, and a further 56 percent are discussing one in their organisations. Yet, many are still very early in the process of PQC planning. An IT manager within a manufacturing company said, We have a budget for security overall. Theres a segment allotted to this, but its not to the level or expense that is appropriate and should be there yet.

The time to start preparing, including inquiring of your vendors readiness for quantum computing threats, is now. One of the respondents, an IT Security manager at a financial services company, told surveyors, Were still in the early discussion phases because were not the only ones who are affected. There are third party partners and vendors that were in early discussions with on how we can be proactive and beef up our security. And quantum cryptology is one of the topics that we are looking at.

Others expanded upon that, noting that their early preparations heavily involve discussing the matter with third parties and vendors. Another focus group member, an IT manager at an industrial construction company, told the group, We have third party security companies that are working with us to come up with solutions to be proactive. So obviously, knock on wood, nothing has happened yet. But we are definitely always proactive from a security standpoint and were definitely trying to make sure that were ready once a solution is available.

Talking to your vendors and third parties should be a key part of any organisations planning process. To that end, organisations should be checking whether their partners will keep supporting and securing customers operations into the age of quantum.

The data itself was still at the centre of respondents minds when it came to protection from quantum threats, and when asked what they were focusing on in their preparations, respondents said that above all they were monitoring their own data. One respondent told us, The data is everything for anybody thats involved in protecting it. And so you just have to stay on top of it along with your vendors and continue to communicate.

One of the prime preparatory best practices that respondents called upon was monitoring. Knowing what kind of data flows within your environment, how its used and how its currently protected are all things that an enterprise has to find out as they prepare.

SEE ALSO:As quantum computing draws near, cryptography security concerns grow

To be sure, overhauling an enterprises cryptographic infrastructure is no small feat, but respondents listed understanding their organisations level of crypto agility as a priority. Quantum might be a few years off, but becoming crypto agile may take just as long.

Organisations will have to plan for a system which can easily swap out, integrate and change cryptographic algorithms within an organisation. Moreover, it must be able to do so quickly, cheaply and without any significant changes to the broader system. Practically, this means installing automated platforms which follow your cryptographic deployments so that you can remediate, revoke, renew, reissue or otherwise control any and all of your certificates at scale.

Many organisations are still taking their first tentative steps, and others have yet to take any. Now is the time for organisations to be assessing their deployments of crypto and digital certificates so they have proper crypto-agility and are ready to deploy quantum-resistant algorithms soon rather than being caught lacking when it finally arrives.

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The view of quantum threats from the front lines - JAXenter

WASHINGTON, February 21, 2020 - U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios expressed confidence in the supremacy of the U.S.s artificial intelligence and quantum computing programs over Chinas, in a talk at the Hudson Institute on Thursday.

United States research on AI and quantum computing features the most highly cited papers, most investment by the private sector, and greatest government funding, he said.

This assertion challenges the Made in China 2025 Initiative, a 10-year plan that China issued in 2015, and which outlined 10 key tech industries in which China hopes to become a world leader.

Recent progress by the Chinese government in the field of high-speed fiber-optic broadband, AI and surveillance have fueled some analysts fears that the Chinese will hit their targets.

Kratsios laid out four key components of a winning tech strategy in which the U.S. excels: Leadership development, a low-regulatory environment, a belief in the power of the citizen workforce, and international engagement with allies.

Kratsios referenced two specific examples to bolster his argument. He mentioned how Trump committed to at least $200 million for STEM education last year, and how American corporations came more than matched that figure by donating $300 million.He also recounted the story that he said put America at the head of the pack in the quantum supremacy race. The story bears upon the uniting of resources invested by the U.S. government in the Quantum Lab at UC Santa Barbara with Googles subsequent acquisition of the lab and connection of that research team to its treasure trove of resources.

Its not a James Bond/Jason Borne crossover, but the concept of quantum supremacy is vital for national security, Kratsios said. America has only achieved it through a free market of ideas involving prudent government investing and private sector intervention.

Governmental funding and R&D are unique in that they fill the gaps that the private sector doesnt focus on.

Kratsios elaborated that the government tends to invest in early-stage, pre-competitive R&D which it expects the private sector to nurture and raise into a mature industry, such as in the case of the UCSB Quantum Lab.

Kratsios also gave made some comments on the proposals that the EU released Wednesday regarding AI and data. He characterized their approach to AI as values-based, and worried that they do not prioritize implementation.

Kratsios also found fault with the documents binary approach to classifying AI as high risk or not high risk, saying the report clumsily attempts to bucket AI-powered technology into two camps when there should be more spectrum and flexibility in the model.

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U.S. Progress on AI and Quantum Computing Will Best China, Says CTO Michael Kratsios - BroadbandBreakfast.com

Scientists have observed a new state of electronic matter on the quantum scale, one that forms when electrons clump together in transit, and it could advance our understanding and application of quantum physics.

Movement is key to this new quantum state. When electric current is applied to semiconductors or metals, the electrons inside usually travel slowly and somewhat haphazardly in one direction.

Not so in a special type of medium known as aballistic conductor, where the movement is faster and more uniform.

The new study shows how in very thin ballistic conducting wires, electrons can gang up creating a whole new quantum state of matter made solely from speeding electrons.

"Normally, electrons in semiconductors or metals move and scatter, and eventually drift in one direction if you apply a voltage," says physicist Jeremy Levy, from the University of Pittsburgh. "But in ballistic conductors the electrons move more like cars on a highway."

"The discovery we made shows that when electrons can be made to attract one another, they can form bunches of two, three, four and five electrons that literally behave like new types of particles, new forms of electronic matter."

Ballistic conductors can be used for stretching the boundaries of what's possible in electronics and classical physics, and the one used in this particular experiment was made from lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate.

Interestingly, when the researchers measured the levels of conductance they found they followed one of the most well-known patterns in mathematics Pascal's triangle. Asconductanceincreased, it stepped up in a pattern that matches one of the rows of Pascal's triangle, following the order 1, 3, 6, 10 and so on.

"The discovery took us some time to understand but it was because we initially did not realise we were looking at particles made up of one electron, two electrons, three electrons and so forth," says Levy.

This clumping of electrons is similar to the way that quarks bind together to form neutrons and protons, according to the researchers. Electrons in superconductors can team up like this too, joining together in pairs to coordinate movement.

The findings may have something to teach us about quantum entanglement, which in turn is key to making progress with quantum computing and a super-secure, super-fast quantum internet.

According to Levy, it's another example of how we're reverse engineering the world based on what we've found from the discovery of the fundamentals of quantum physics building on important work done in the last few decades.

"Now in the 21st century, we're looking at all the strange predictions of quantum physics and turning them around and using them," says Levy.

"When you talk about applications, we're thinking about quantum computing, quantum teleportation, quantum communications, quantum sensing ideas that use the properties of the quantum nature of matter that were ignored before."

The research has been published in Science.

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Scientists Have Discovered a Brand New Electronic State of Matter - ScienceAlert

Concerns that quantum computing could place current encryption techniques at risk have been around for some time.

But now cybersecurity startup Active Cypher has built a password-hacking quantum computer to demonstrate that the dangers are very real.

Using easily available parts costing just $600, Active Cyphers founder and CTO, Dan Gleason, created a portable quantum computer dubbed QUBY (named after qubits, the basic unit of quantum information). QUBY runs recently open-sourced quantum algorithms capable of executing within a quantum emulator that can perform cryptographic cracking algorithms. Calculations that would have otherwise taken years on conventional computers are now performed in seconds on QUBY.

Gleason explains, "After years of foreseeing this danger and trying to warn the cybersecurity community that current cybersecurity protocols were not up to par, I decided to take a week and move my theory to prototype. I hope that QUBY can increase awareness of how the cyberthreats of quantum computing are not reserved to billion-dollar state-sponsored projects, but can be seen on much a smaller, localized scale."

The concern is that quantum computing will lead to the sunset of AES-256 (the current encryption standard), meaning all encrypted files could one day be decrypted. "The disruption that will come about from that will be on an unprecedented, global scale. It's going to be massive," says Gleason. Modelled after the SADM, a man-portable nuclear weapon deployed in the 1960s, QUBY was downsized so that it fits in a backpack and is therefore untraceable. Low-level 'neighborhood hackers' have already been using portable devices that can surreptitiously swipe credit card information from an unsuspecting passerby. Quantum compute emulating devices will open the door for significantly more cyberthreats.

In response to the threat, Active Cypher has developed advanced dynamic cyphering encryption that is built to be quantum resilient. Gleason explains that, "Our encryption is not based on solving a mathematical problem. It's based on a very large, random key which is used in creating the obfuscated cyphertext, without any key information within the cyphertext, and is thus impossible to be derived through prime factorization -- traditional brute force attempts which use the cyphertext to extract key information from patterns derived from the key material."

Active Cypher's completely random cyphertext cannot be deciphered using even large quantum computers since the only solution to cracking the key is to try every possible combination of the key, which will produce every known possible output of the text, without knowledge of which version might be the correct one. "In other words, you'll find a greater chance of finding a specific grain of sand in a desert than cracking this open," says Gleason.

Active Cypher showcased QUBY in early February at Ready -- an internal Microsoft conference held in Seattle. The prototype will also be presented at RSA in San Francisco later this month.

Originally posted here:

The $600 quantum computer that could spell the end for conventional encryption - BetaNews

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of quantum computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBMs claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Googles announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.

Yet with much less fanfare, there has also been rapid progress in the development of quantum communication networks, and a master network to unite them all called the quantum internet. Just as the internet as we know it followed the development of computers, we can expect the quantum computer to be accompanied by the safer, better synchronised quantum internet.

Like quantum computing, quantum communication records information in what are known as qubits, similar to the way digital systems use bits and bytes. Whereas a bit can only take the value of zero or one, a qubit can also use the principles of quantum physics to take the value of zero and one at the same time. This is what allows quantum computers to perform certain computations very quickly. Instead of solving several variants of a problem one by one, the quantum computer can handle them all at the same time.

These qubits are central to the quantum internet because of a property called entanglement. If two entangled qubits are geographically separated (for instance, one qubit in Dublin and the other in New York), measurements of both would yield the same result. This would enable the ultimate in secret communications, a shared knowledge between two parties that cannot be discovered by a third. The resulting ability to code and decode messages would be one of the most powerful features of the quantum internet.

Commercial applications

There will be no shortage of commercial applications for these advanced cryptographic mechanisms. The world of finance, in particular, looks set to benefit as the quantum internet will lead to enhanced privacy for online transactions and stronger proof of the funds used in the transaction.

Recently, at the CONNECT Centre in Trinity College Dublin, we successfully implemented an algorithm that could achieve this level of security. That this took place during a hackathon a sort of competition for computer programmers shows that even enthusiasts without detailed knowledge of quantum physics can create some of the building blocks that will be needed for the quantum internet. This technology wont be confined to specialist university departments, just as the original internet soon outgrew its origins as a way to connect academics around the world.

But how could this quantum internet be built anytime soon when we currently can only build very limited quantum computers? Well, the devices in the quantum internet dont have to be completely quantum in nature, and the network wont require massive quantum machines to handle the communication protocols.

One qubit here and there is all a quantum communication network needs to function. Instead of replacing the current infrastructure of optical fibres, data centres and base stations, the quantum internet will build on top of and make maximum use of the existing, classical internet.

With such rapid progress being made, quantum internet technology is set to shape the business plans of telecom companies in the near future. Financial institutions are already using quantum communication networks to make inter-bank transactions safer. And quantum communication satellites are up and running as the first step to extending these networks to a global scale.

The pipes of the quantum internet are effectively being laid as you read this. When a big quantum computer is finally built, it can be plugged into this network and accessed on the cloud, with all the privacy guarantees of quantum cryptography.

What will the ordinary user notice when the enhanced cryptography of the quantum internet becomes available? Very little, in all likelihood. Cryptography is like waste management: if everything works well, the customer doesnt even notice.

In the constant race of the codemakers and codebreakers, the quantum internet wont just prevent the codebreakers taking the lead. It will move the race track into another world altogether, with a significant head start for the codemakers. With data becoming the currency of our times, the quantum internet will provide stronger security for a new valuable commodity.

Harun iljak, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Complex Systems Science for Telecommunications, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

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Quantum Internet: The Technology That Could Change Everything? - The National Interest Online

While quantum computing tends to garner all the headlines, quantum technology also has huge promise for the communication networks of the future. Thats why on top of the roughly $450 million the Trump administration just earmarked for quantum research in their proposed budget, theres $25 million dedicated to building a nationwide quantum internet.

At what point a quantum network becomes the quantum internet is up for debate, but its likely to develop in phases of increasing sophistication, with the ultimate goal being a global network of quantum-connected quantum computers.

The US is well behind China on this front, though. A team led by quantum supremo Jian-Wei Pan have already demonstrated a host of breakthroughs in transmitting quantum signals to satellites, most recently developing a mobile quantum satellite station.

The reason both countries are rushing to develop the technology is that it could provide an ultra-secure communication channel in an era where cyberwarfare is becoming increasingly common.

Its essentially impossible to eavesdrop on a quantum conversation. The strange rules of quantum mechanics mean that measuring a quantum state immediately changes it, so any message encoded in quantum states will be corrupted if someone tries to intercept it.

But quantum states are also intrinsically fragile, which has made it difficult to establish quantum connections over large distances. But a team led by Pan has reported smashing the record for connecting two quantum memories in a paper in Nature.

Making a quantum connection relies on a phenomenon known as entanglement. If the states of two quantum objects are entangled, manipulating or measuring the state of one will be mirrored in the other. In theory this allows you to transmit quantum information instantaneously over very large distances.

So far most research has been done on entangled photonsincluding Pans work on quantum satellitesbut single particles can only carry limited information. Quantum memories, which are made up of clouds of millions of rubidium atoms, can store more, but the biggest distance theyd previously been entangled over was 1.3 kilometers.

Pans team came up with a clever workaround, as John Timmer explains in Ars Technica. Each quantum memory is set by shooting a photon at it, which causes the memory to emit another photon that is entangled with the state of the memory. This photon is then converted to an infrared wavelength so it can be transmitted over fiber optic cable.

The photons from each memory meet at a halfway point where they are measured in such a way that they become entangled. Because each was already entangled with their respective memories, these both become entangled as well, setting up the quantum connection.

The researchers carried out two experiments, one where they transmitted photons over 22 kilometers of cable buried underground between two separate facilities and one where they sent the particles around a 50-kilometer spool of optical cable in their lab.

The authors say those kinds of distances make it feasible to connect cities on a quantum internet and could be used to create quantum repeaters, a series of nodes that help boost the signal over longer distances.

But theres still some way to go. The process of converting the photons into a form that can travel along the fiber optic loses about 30 percent of the photons. The complex process involved in entangling the two photons also leads to further inefficiencies, which means theyre only able to successfully entangle photons roughly twice a second.

Thats a problem, because the memories only hold their state for 70 microseconds. The researchers admit they likely need to both boost the lifetime of the memories and the rate of entanglement for this approach to work in practice.

Its early, but the research is a significant step towards a quantum internet. If the US wants to play any part in its development, its going to have to play catch-up.

Image Credit: Garik Barseghyan from Pixabay

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This Breakthrough Just Got Us One Step Closer to a Quantum Internet - Singularity Hub

Labs around the world are racing to develop new computing and sensing devices that operate on the principles of quantum mechanics and could offer dramatic advantages over their classical counterparts. But these technologies still face several challenges, and one of the most significant is how to deal with noise random fluctuations that can eradicate the data stored in such devices.

A new approach developed by researchers at MIT could provide a significant step forward in quantum error correction. The method involves fine-tuning the system to address the kinds of noise that are the most likely, rather than casting a broad net to try to catch all possible sources of disturbance.

The analysis is described in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper by MIT graduate student David Layden, postdoc Mo Chen, and professor of nuclear science and engineering Paola Cappellaro.

The main issues we now face in developing quantum technologies are that current systems are small and noisy, says Layden. Noise, meaning unwanted disturbance of any kind, is especially vexing because many quantum systems are inherently highly sensitive, a feature underlying some of their potential applications.

And theres another issue, Layden says, which is that quantum systems are affected by any observation. So, while one can detect that a classical system is drifting and apply a correction to nudge it back, things are more complicated in the quantum world. What's really tricky about quantum systems is that when you look at them, you tend to collapse them, he says.

Classical error correction schemes are based on redundancy. For example, in a communication system subject to noise, instead of sending a single bit (1 or 0), one might send three copies of each (111 or 000). Then, if the three bits dont match, that shows there was an error. The more copies of each bit get sent, the more effective the error correction can be.

The same essential principle could be applied to adding redundancy in quantum bits, or qubits. But, Layden says, If I want to have a high degree of protection, I need to devote a large part of my system to doing these sorts of checks. And this is a nonstarter right now because we have fairly small systems; we just dont have the resources to do particularly useful quantum error correction in the usual way. So instead, the researchers found a way to target the error correction very narrowly at the specific kinds of noise that were most prevalent.

The quantum system theyre working with consists of carbon nuclei near a particular kind of defect in a diamond crystal called a nitrogen vacancy center. These defects behave like single, isolated electrons, and their presence enables the control of the nearby carbon nuclei.

But the team found that the overwhelming majority of the noise affecting these nuclei came from one single source: random fluctuations in the nearby defects themselves. This noise source can be accurately modeled, and suppressing its effects could have a major impact, as other sources of noise are relatively insignificant.

We actually understand quite well the main source of noise in these systems, Layden says. So we don't have to cast a wide net to catch every hypothetical type of noise.

The team came up with a different error correction strategy, tailored to counter this particular, dominant source of noise. As Layden describes it, the noise comes from this one central defect, or this one central electron, which has a tendency to hop around at random. It jitters.

That jitter, in turn, is felt by all those nearby nuclei, in a predictable way that can be corrected.

The upshot of our approach is that were able to get a fixed level of protection using far fewer resources than would otherwise be needed, he says. We can use a much smaller system with this targeted approach.

The work so far is theoretical, and the team is actively working on a lab demonstration of this principle in action. If it works as expected, this could make up an important component of future quantum-based technologies of various kinds, the researchers say, including quantum computers that could potentially solve previously unsolvable problems, or quantum communications systems that could be immune to snooping, or highly sensitive sensor systems.

This is a component that could be used in a number of ways, Layden says. Its as though were developing a key part of an engine. Were still a ways from building a full car, but weve made progress on a critical part.

"Quantum error correction is the next challenge for the field," says Alexandre Blais, a professor of physics at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, who was not associated with this work. "The complexity of current quantum error correcting codes is, however, daunting as they require a very large number of qubits to robustly encode quantum information."

Blais adds, "We have now come to realize that exploiting our understanding of the devices in which quantum error correction is to be implemented can be very advantageous.This work makes an important contribution in this direction by showing that a common type of error can be corrected for in a much more efficient manner than expected. For quantum computers to become practical we need more ideas like this."

The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

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Correcting the jitters in quantum devices - MIT News

Just five years ago, the Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, was seriously fraying at the edges and appeared to be tilting toward obsolescence. Things have since taken a turn for the better.

Related: Why PKI is well-suited to secure the Internet of Things

PKI is the authentication and encryption framework on which the Internet is built. The buckling of PKI a few years back was a very serious matter, especially since there was nothing waiting in the wings to replace PKI. Lacking a reliable way to authenticate identities during the data transfer process, and also keep data encrypted as it moves between endpoints, the Internet would surely atrophy and digital transformation would grind to a halt.

The retooling of PKI may not be sexy to anyone, outside of tech geeks. Nonetheless, it is a pivotal chapter in the evolution of digital commerce. One of several notable contributors was DigiCert, the worlds leading provider of digital certificates and certificate management solutions.

I had a chance to interview Brian Trzupek, DigiCerts senior vice president of emerging markets products, at the companys Security Summit 2020 in San Diego recently. For a full drill down on our discussion, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are a few key takeaways:

PKIs expanding role

PKI revolves around the creation, distribution and management of digital certificates issued by companies known as certificate authorities, or CAs. In the classic case of a human user clicking to a website, CAs, like DigiCert, verify the authenticity of the website and encrypt the data at both ends.

Today, a much larger and rapidly expanding role for PKI and digital certificates is to authenticate devices and encrypt all sensitive data transfers inside highly dynamic company networks. Were not just talking about website clicks; PKI comes into play with respect to each of the millions of computing instances and devices continually connecting to each other the stuff of DevOps and IoT. It can be as granular as a microservice in a software container connecting to a mobile app, for instance. Each one of these digital hookups requires PKI and a digital certificate to ensure authentication.

Much like the Internet, PKI evolved somewhat haphazardly in the first two decades of this century to enable website activity and it has come a long, long way since. PKIs core components derive from open source, corporate and entrepreneurial beginnings. By 2015 or so, the early pioneer PKI services companies had made their profits and had gotten themselves swallowed up by tech conglomerates in a wave of consolidation.

In late 2017, DigiCert announced it would acquire Symantecs PKI division for $1 billion. At the time, Symantec very much wanted out of having anything to do with PKI; Google had just announced plans to distrust all Symantec-issued certificates, after a long tussle with the security vendor for failing to meet industry standards. DigiCert took the best of what Symantec had and combined it with tech that DigiCert did well, and worked feverishly to modernize PKI.

Trzupek

Symantec just didnt spend a whole lot of time actually integrating those businesses, Trzupek told me. They had acquired all of these PKI systems, order-entry systems, e-commerce systems, validation systems. . . it was like a million tiny freestanding companies and we had to try to figure out how to consolidate all of that.

Platform challenges

A lot has transpired over the past two years. The CA/Browser Forum, an industry standards body founded in 2005, accelerated initiatives to drive better practices and guidelines. Outside of the CAB Forum, many industries, from healthcare to automotive to manufacturing, have created standards and implemented digital certificate protections through global PKI practices that strengthen device security

Taken together these efforts have brought a semblance of order to the topsy-turvy world of enterprise PKIs. Companies had come to rely on a hodge podge of systems to authenticate remote workers and contractors, while at the same time delving deeper into DevOps, and also pressing forward with wider use of IoT systems.

What we saw across all of that was a platform problem, Trzupek says. People were trying to use PKI and certificates in many different kinds of ways and all of this was being jammed through very old legacy tools.

For its part, DigiCert responded by sending Trzupek on the road to visit 70 PKI customers in 12 nations and listen closely to what was on their minds. DigiCert used that feedback as the basis to design leading-edge PKI deployment and management tools and services, built on a flexible, scalable platform for speed and efficiency.

The first step is to take a very manual inventory of what the parent company is doing with PKI, and what all of the sub-entities and subdivisions are doing with PKI, just figuring out who manages those projects and what PKI is being used for, Trzupek says. Then theres an organizational component where you can consolidate management of PKIs and do things like standardizing tools.

Future use cases

Innovations to help companies more efficiently manage sprawling PKI deployments continue to advance, and none too soon. Large and mid-sized enterprises are stepping up their use of DevOps and embracing philosophies like fail fast, the notion of quickly deploying minimumally viable software to learn where it works or fails, and then iterating and remediating the shortcomings.

This is how dynamic services are getting spun up; such services are capable of scaling up to serve high volume demand, cheaply and very quickly, and then wind down just as quickly. DigiCert is focusing on putting PKI at the nerve center of these types of scenarios, where short-lived certificates, with low latency and high availability, come into play.

A lot of places need dynamic scale related to consumption, and they need that environment to be trusted, and thats where PKI comes in, Trzupek says. As we look to the future, its all about getting more dynamic so we can interoperate with that world and produce certificates as they need them.

Its encouraging that PKI is once again on solid footing, were certainly going to need it, going forward. Data is the new oil, futurist and theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku, told attendees of DigiCert Security Summit 2020. Following the mainstreaming of steam power, then electricity and then the Internet, were today on the brink of the fourth wave giant technical leaps forward, observes Kaku, author of The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind.

Kaku argues that silicon chip-based computing has maxed out and will very soon be replaced by quantum computers which manipulate atoms to make massive calculations. Quantum computers can rather easily break the strongest encryption we have today. The good news is that the tech community has factored this into long term planning for the care and feeding and future viabilityof PKI.

A major public-private effort is underway to revamp classical cryptography, and ultimately replace it with something called post-quantum-cryptography, or PQC. DigiCert happens to be in the thick of this effort and has already begun offering strategies for companies to future proof sensitive systems for the coming of quantum computing.

Devices being put into service today, like cars and airplanes and IoT systems that have embedded sensors have long term life cycles, says Avesta Hojjati, DigiCerts head of research and development. Were striving to protect those devices, right now, against threats that are coming in the next five to 10 years.

In an environment where fail fast is the philosophy ushering us into the quantum computing era, there is a huge role for robust, reliable and continually improving PKI. We appear to be on that path. Ill keep watch.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Last Watchdog authored by bacohido. Read the original post at: https://www.lastwatchdog.com/my-take-pki-digital-certificates-now-ready-to-take-on-the-task-of-securing-digital-transformation/

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MY TAKE: PKI, digital certificates now ready to take on the task of securing digital transformation - Security Boulevard