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The National Security Agency fears a quantum computing breakthrough by Americas adversaries would jeopardize the security of the global economy and allow foes to peer inside top-secret communications systems.

The agencys concern is that an unforeseen advance in quantum technology would crack encryption systems used to protect everything from financial transactions to sensitive communications involving nuclear weapons, according to NSA Director of Research Gil Herrera.

Speaking at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event last week, Mr. Herrera said no country has a quantum computer that he would consider useful yet.

He said there are a lot of teams around the world building with different technologies and someone could achieve a development representing a black swan event, an extremely unexpected occurrence with profound and dangerous consequences for U.S. national security.

If this black swan event happens, then were really screwed, Mr. Herrera said.

Americans could suffer consequences from such a quantum leap in several ways. Mr. Herrera said the world economy, and the U.S. market in particular, are vulnerable because most financial transactions are secured by encryption systems that cant be cracked by non-quantum means.

If quantum tech weakens or eliminates such encryption walls, then financial institutions may have to resort to older transaction methods and banks would look for other means to protect their dealings with other banks, according to Mr. Herrera.

And, he warned, other industries may be even less resilient in the face of the threat. Mr. Herrera said the threat of a quantum computer is not limited to its immediate potential damage, but to the fallout from obtaining encrypted information that was previously recorded.

Drawing on his decades of experience at Sandia National Laboratories, Mr. Herrera said a quantum advance may be able to help people find information on weapons systems that have been in the U.S. arsenal for a significant period of time.

There are ways that we can communicate with our various partners in nuclear weapon production where public key encryption is utilized to share keys, Mr. Herrera said. And now, what if somebodys recorded that information and they crack it?

Details on foreign adversaries advanced computing capabilities are closely guarded, Federal policymakers are worried in particular about Chinas efforts to achieve computing breakthroughs.

Reflecting on supercomputers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last year, Rep. Morgan Luttrell said he worried Beijing may have already surpassed the U.S. in its supercomputing prowess.

China should have on board or online another computer that would have trumped us and pushed us back some, the Texas Republican said at the March 2023 hearing. So the amount of money theyre spending in that space as compared to us would make me think that theyre ahead of us.

Retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, then in charge of U.S. Cyber Command, cautioned Mr. Luttrell against assuming that outspending America would guarantee an adversarys technological success.

Spending money doesnt necessarily mean that youre the best in what you do and being able to integrate that kind of capability is what really matters, Gen. Nakasone said at the hearing. So being able to take the intelligence, integrate it within maneuver force to have an outcome is where I clearly see United States has the lead.

But experts agree that quantum computing breakthroughs would dramatically outdo existing supercomputers. The NSA is not waiting to find out.

Mr. Herrera said the NSA believes the algorithms it is deploying will withstand a quantum attack.

One thing NSA has done about it is we actually started research in quantum-resistant algorithms not too long after we started funding academic programs to come up with what a quantum computer would look like, Mr. Herrera said. So we have a lot of maturity within the NSA, we have been deploying quantum-resistant encryption in certain key national security applications for a while now.

Efforts to better understand the quantum capabilities of Americas adversaries are underway as well. The congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission is scrutinizing the communist countrys push to transform its military through the application of quantum and emerging technologies to its weapons systems and logistics.

Last month, the commission conducted a hearing that included an examination of Chinas quest for teleportation technology.

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NSA fears quantum computing surprise: 'If this black swan event happens, then we're really screwed' - Washington Times

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum devices can be problematic. Researchers from Waseda University report developing a new algorithm post-processing variationally scheduled quantum algorithm (pVSQA) that speeds performance.

Therea brief account of the work posted today on the Waseda University website. Constrained combinatorial problems (COP) are common in logistics, supply chain management, machine learning, material design, and drug discovery. The researchers report the novelty of their algorithm is its use of a post-processing technique combined with variational scheduling to achieve high-quality solutions to COPs in a short time.

The two main methods for solving COPs with quantum devices are variational scheduling and post-processing. Our algorithm combines variational scheduling with a post-processing method that transforms infeasible solutions into feasible ones, allowing us to achieve near-optimal solutions for constrained COPs on both quantum annealers and gate-based quantum computers, said Tatsuhiko Shirai, a leader in the work, which was published in EEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering this month.

Heres a brief excerpt from the article:

The innovative pVSQA algorithm uses a quantum device to first generate a variational quantum state via quantum computation. This is then used to generate a probability distribution function which consists of all the feasible and infeasible solutions that are within the constraints of the COP. Next, the post-processing method transforms the infeasible solutions into feasible ones, leaving the probability distribution with only feasible solutions. A classical computer is then used to calculate an energy expectation value of the cost function using this new probability distribution. Repeating this calculation results in a near-optimal solution.

The researchers analyzed the performance of this algorithm using both a simulator and real quantum devices such as a quantum annealer and a gate-type quantum device. The experiments revealed that pVSQA achieves a near-optimal performance within a predetermined time on the simulator and outperforms conventional quantum algorithms without post-processing on real quantum devices.

Given the limits of current quantum devices (adiabatic annealers and gate-based systems), the researchers suggest the new algorithm is a significant step forwards particularly given the wider applicability of constrained combinatorial optimization.

They note in the papers abstract:

COPs are typically transformed into ground-state search problems of the Ising model on a quantum annealer or gate-based quantum device. Variational methods are used to find an optimal schedule function that leads to high-quality solutions in a short amount of time. Post-processing techniques convert the output solutions of the quantum devices to satisfy the constraints of the COPs.

pVSQA combines the variational methods and the post-processing technique. We obtain a sufficient condition for constrained COPs to apply pVSQA based on a greedy post-processing algorithm. We apply the proposed method to two constrained NP-hard COPs: the graph partitioning problem and the quadratic knapsack problem. pVSQA on a simulator shows that a small number of variational parameters is sufficient to achieve a (near-)optimal performance within a predetermined operation time. Then building upon the simulator results, we implement pVSQA on a quantum annealer and a gate-based quantum device. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Link to Waseda University article, https://www.waseda.jp/top/en/news/80146

Link to IEEE paper, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10472069

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Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization - HPCwire