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LONDON andMOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Standard Chartered Bank and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have signed a Collaborative Research Agreement to partner on quantum computing research and developing quantum computing applications.

In finance, the most promising use cases with real-world applications include quantum machine learning models (generating synthetic data and data anonymisation) and discriminative models (building strong classifiers and predictors) with multiple potential uses such as credit scoring and generating trading signals. As quantum computing technology matures, clients should benefit from higher quality services such as faster execution, better risk management and the development of new financial products.

Kahina Van Dyke, Global Head of Digital Channels and Client Data Analytics at Standard Chartered, said: "Similar to other major technological advancements, quantum computing is set to bring widespread benefits as well as disrupt many existing business processes. This is why it's important for companies to future-proof themselves by adopting this new technology from an early stage. The partnership with USRA gives us access to world-class academic researchers and provides us with a unique opportunity to explore a wide range of models and algorithms with the potential to establish quantum advantage for the real-world use cases."

Bernie Seery, Senior VP of Technology at USRA noted that "This partnership with the private sector enables a diversity of research through a competitively selected portfolio of quantum computing research projects involving academic institutions and non-profits, growing an ecosystem for quantum artificial intelligence that has already involved over 150 researchers from more than 40 organizations that produced over 50 peer-reviewed publications over the last seven years."

Alex Manson, Global Head of SC Ventures, Standard Chartered's innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, stated: "The world is currently in the process of identifying commercial use cases where quantum computer capabilities will surpass classical computers. We have a conviction that some of these use cases will transform the way we manage risks in financial services, for example by simulating portfolios and exponentially speeding up the generation of market data. We will work with USRA to identify such use cases in financial services, with a view to implementing them within our bank, as well as potentially offering this service to other market participants over time."

Mark Johnson, Vice President, Processor Design, Development and Quantum Products at D-Wave said: "Quantum computing research and development are poised to have a profound impact on the industries responsible for solving today's most complex problems. That's why researchers and businesses alike are looking to quantum computing today to start demonstrating tangible value. We're proud to work with USRA and Standard Chartered Bank as they improve global access to quantum systems and undertake essential research and development."

At USRA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Dr. Davide Venturelli, Associate Director for Quantum Computing, notes that quantum annealing is implementing a powerful approach to computing, featuring unique advantages with respect to other traditional and novel approaches, that should be studied, theoretically and experimentally, to advance the state of art of computing technologies for the benefit of nearly all disciplines.

Standard Chartered's team, led by Dr. Alexei Kondratyev, Global Head of Data Science and Innovation, and USRA have collaborated in quantum computing research since 2017. An earlier success in investigating the quantum annealing approach to computational problems in portfolio optimisation use cases led to this strategic partnership, where USRA will continue to support fundamental academic research in quantum physics and artificial intelligence and Standard Chartered will focus on future commercial applications.

In 2012, USRA partnered with NASA to found the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL): the space agency's hub to evaluate the near-term impact of quantum technologies. With QuAIL, the USRA team has investigated the physics, the engineering and the performance of multiple generations of quantum annealing processors built by D-Wave Systems, as well as participating in U.S. government research programs that looked into application of quantum annealing for combinatorial optimization, aviation, earth science and machine learning. NASA Ames Research Center is currently hosting a D-Wave 2000Q annealing system that will be made available for free for research by U.S. Universities, thanks to the support of this partnership.

Standard Chartered and USRA intend to develop this initial collaboration beyond quantum annealing to all unconventional computing systems that could provide an advantage to applications of interest, such as gate-model noisy-intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) processors and Coherent Ising machines.

For more information, contact: Standard Chartered: Group Media Relations Contact: Shaun Gamble, [emailprotected] Tel: +44 2078855934

USRA: PR Contact: Suraiya Farukhi, [emailprotected] Technical Contact: David Bell, [emailprotected]

About USRA

Foundedin 1969, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the U.S. Government, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) is a nonprofit corporation chartered to advance space-related science, technology and engineering. USRA operates scientific institutes and facilities, and conducts other major research and educational programs, under Federal funding. USRA engages the university community and employs in-house scientific leadership, innovative research and development, and project management expertise.RIACS is a USRA department for research in fundamental and applied information sciences, leading projects on quantum computing funded by NASA, DARPA, the US Airforce and NSF.

More info at: https://riacs.usra.edu/quantum/and http://www.usra.edu.

About Standard Chartered

We are a leading international banking group, with a presence in 59 of the world's most dynamic markets, and serving clients in a further 85. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, Here for good.

Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges as well as the Bombay and National Stock Exchanges in India.

For more stories and expert opinions please visitInsightsatsc.com. Follow Standard Chartered onTwitter,LinkedInandFacebook.

SOURCE Universities Space Research Association

http://www.usra.edu

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Standard Chartered and Universities Space Research Association join forces on Quantum Computing - PRNewswire

To achieve long-term data protection in todays fast-changing and uncertain world, companies need the ability to respond quickly to unforeseen events. Threats like quantum computing are getting more real while cryptographic algorithms are subject to decay or compromise. Without the ability to identify, manage and replace vulnerable keys and certificates quickly and easily, companies are at risk.

So, what do we mean when we talk about crypto-agility? Fundamentally, you will have achieved crypto-agility when your security systems are able to rapidly deploy and update algorithms, cryptographic primitives, and other encryption mechanisms. Going a step further, it means you have achieved complete control over cryptographic mechanisms your public key infrastructure (PKI) and associated processes and can quickly make whatever changes are needed without intense manual effort.

The replacement of manual processes with automated ones is critical to keeping up with accelerating change. As computing power and security technologies continue to evolve at a faster and faster pace, your existing cryptographic infrastructure is destined to become obsolete in a few years unless you can keep it upgraded to the latest technologies. Notably, threats continue to evolve as well.

Moreover, as the world transforms to depend on digital systems more fully, weve embedded cryptography deeply into virtually every communication system in the world. Its no longer possible for cryptography to remain isolated from other critical systems. The vast interdependent nature of modern systems makes it imperative that IT teams have the ability to respond quickly or face the risk of major outages and disruption.

Cryptographic standards like RSA, ECC, and AES that are in broad use today are constantly being updated with more advanced versions. Eventually governing bodies like NIST get in the act and mandate the use of the latest standards, with browser and cloud providers often raising the bar as well. To avoid becoming non-compliant, you must have the ability to quickly upgrade all your systems that rely on deprecated cryptography.

A robust, cryptographically agile infrastructure also brings other long-term benefits and plays a critical role in preventing security breaches. Achieving crypto-agility will make your operations teams more efficient, and eliminate unnecessary costs such consulting fees, temporary staff, fines, or remediation costs.

Such scenarios can unfold when a bad actor gains admin access, for instance, and may or may not have issued certificates. This uncertainty means that certificates from the impacted certificate authority (CA) can no longer be trusted and all certs from that CA must be revoked and re-issued. Without crypto-agility and a clear understanding of your potential exposure, youre looking at a costly all-hands-on-deck response to track and update hundreds or thousands of certs. And, of course, anytime you have humans involved with security response, youre opening yourself to human error and further compromise and outages.

The looming threat of quantum computing some say we could see 100,000x faster quantum computers as soon as 2025 represents another compelling reason to focus on improving your crypto-agility. While all crypto algorithms are breakable on paper, the incredible computing power required for such a feat does not currently exist. That could change with quantum computers which one day will be able to break most existing algorithms and hash function in minutes or hours.

To avoid the doomsday scenario where every system in the world is potentially exposed to compromise, work is already underway toward quantum-safe cryptography. However, given how little we know about quantum computing and the inability to perform real-world testing, its safe to assume there will be considerable give and take before quantum-safe algorithms are widely available.

In the meantime, your cryptography, certificate management and key distribution systems must be agile enough to adapt to this very real emerging threat. The table below presents a scenario of the time and expense involved with swapping out existing cryptography for quantum-safe cryptography. In this scenario, with incomplete or partial automation most enterprises would be looking at a 15-month vulnerability period compared to just six days when a fully automated solution has been put in place.

A comparison of quantum doomsday mitigation scenarios

Crypto-agility is a complex topic at scale and working towards it requires a multifaceted approach. Changes need to be made to security setups in organizational policy, operating methods, and core technology and processes. Your PKI may need to be upgraded and enhanced to support rapid swaps of cryptography, and software development procedures may need to be revamped to incorporate a nimbler approach to cryptography as opposed to being bolted on top of finished software.

The first step toward true crypto-agility is to understand the extent of your cryptographic exposure. This is accomplished by tracking down every digital certificate deployed across the organization and capturing details including algorithms and their size, the type of hashing/signature, validity period, where its located and how it can be used.

Once you have a complete inventory, youll then need to identify the vulnerable certificates by the type of cryptography in use and look for anomalies and potential problems. These can include certificates that use wildcards or IP address, certificates located on unauthorized or unintended systems as well as certificates abandoned on deprecated systems.

Finding your certificates and vulnerability isnt enough by itself to deliver crypto-agility youre still looking at the aforementioned 15-month-long process if you need to swap everything out manually.

Here are three pillars of crypto-agility that will put your organization on the right path toward withstanding whatever the future holds:

#1 Automate discovery and reporting. At the push of a button, you should be able to produce a full report of all your cryptographic assets. This will allow you quickly identify vulnerable cryptography and to report anomalies. There are any number of tools available to help you do this, but ideally certificate reporting should just be incorporated into an automated PKI solution.

#2 Automate PKI operations at scale. The ideal solution here is a fully automated Certificate Management Systems (CMS) that will manage the entire lifecycle of a certificate from creation to renewal. When the CMS is used to create a certificate it should have all the data it needs to not only monitor the certificate for expiration but automatically provision a replacement certificate without human intervention.

#3 Be nimble. At an organization and management level, your IT organization from DevOps through to day-to-day operations staff need to be ready for threats and change. You should carefully evaluate and rethink all aspects of your PKI to identify areas that may lock you into a particular vendor or technology.

The risk of having a slow-to-respond cryptographic infrastructure is increasingly daily, not only as digital transformations increase our dependency on inter-connected systems but as external threats and technology evolve with increasing pace. Looming above it all is the threat of quantum computing. Put it all together and its clear that the time to automate your PKI and move toward crypto-agility is at hand.

Read more here:
The crypto-agility mandate, and how to get there - Help Net Security

Researchers at MIT have developed a process to manufacture and integrate "artificial atoms" with photonic circuitry, and in doing so, are able to produce the largest quantum chip of its kind.

The atoms, which are created by atomic-scale defects in microscopically thin slices of diamond, allow for the scaling up of quantum chip production.

RELATED: 7 REASONS WHY WE SHOULD BE EXCITED BY QUANTUM COMPUTERS

The new development marks a turning point in the field of scalable quantum processors, Dirk Englund, an associate professor in MITs Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, explained in a press release.

Millions of quantum processors will be required for the oncoming, much-hyped advent of quantum computing. This new research shows there is a viable way to scale up processor production, the MIT team says.

The qubits in the newly-developed chip are artificial atoms made from defects in diamond. These can be prodded with visible light and microwaves, making them emit photons that carry quantum information.

This hybrid approach is described by Englund and his colleagues in a study published inNature.The paper details how the team carefully selected "quantum micro chiplets" that contained multiple diamond-based qubits and integrated them onto an aluminum nitride photonic integrated circuit.

In the past 20 years of quantum engineering, it has been the ultimate vision to manufacture such artificial qubit systems at volumes comparable to integrated electronics, Englund explained. Although there has been remarkable progress in this very active area of research, fabrication and materials complications have thus far yielded just two to three emitters per photonic system.

Using their hybrid method, Englund and his team successfully built a 128-qubit system. In doing so, they made history by constructing the largest integrated artificial atom-photonics chip yet.

Its quite exciting in terms of the technology, Marko Lonar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study, told MIT News. They were able to get stable emitters in a photonic platform while maintaining very nice quantum memories.

The next step for the researchers is to find a way to automate their process. In doing so, they will enable the production of even bigger chips, which will be necessary for modular quantum computers and multichannelquantum repeaters that transport qubits over long distances, the researchers say.

Originally posted here:
MIT's New Diamond-Based Quantum Chip Is the Largest Yet - Interesting Engineering

Listening to educator, inventor and scientist Scott Stornetta on May 30th during the presentation curated by the Government Blockchain Association Of UAE provided insight into one of the least understood problems in blockchains. Stornetta was part of the team that created what can be called a proto blockchain. With three out of nine references in the bitcoin paper by Satoshi Nakomoto, Stornetta and co-inventor Stuart Habers ideas have had an outsize influence on the design of bitcoin and of subsequent blockchains.

Stornetta answered a question about what message he will have if he were to ever meet Satoshi. Stornetta said that he would ask him to fully read the second paper. Here Stornetta is referring to a way to upgrade bitcoin or any time-stamping mechanism, if the signature algorithm is in danger of being compromised.

That paper deals with two topics, one of which is familiar to us from bitcoin and other blockchains. The use of Merkle trees as a way of aggregating the commitments and referring to just the root of the tree, which if timestamped and witnessed properly, ensures immutability of all the leaf documents or transactions. This is a way to refer to lots of transactions with just a single number. This is the basis of the concept of block in blockchain.

The papers second topic is how to renew the timestamps of documents if the cryptography behind timestamping using signatures is in danger of being broken. The simple prescription is to renew the timestamp, referring to the document (the hash) and the old signature in the new one.

Stornetta and Habers concerns were to preserving immutable and unrepudiatable references to digital documents with the time they are entered into a registry. That is not about value exchange and control of assets, like most other blockchains. They also make the observation that the timestamp, if fixed in a chain at a time known to be before the break, can be assumed to be correct.

Two baby elephants, symbols of renewal, walk among a herd at the Minneriya National Park in ... [+] Minneriya on July 8, 2020.

Many of the cryptographic structures behind any blockchain network are relatively safe from quantum computing as they are based on hash functions which are quantum resistant. For bitcoin and for other blockchains, this means that, Merkle trees and the structure of the chain itself are quite safe as most of this is based on hashes.

The vulnerability of digital signatures to Shors algorithm using quantum cryptanalysis is a Damocles sword that hangs over any blockchain that is meant to last for ever. Although, it is improbable that quantum computing will be able to break the signature algorithm in the short term there is a possibility that it will in the long run. For decentralized value exchanges whose longevity should be measured in hundreds of years, this consideration is crucial.

The more quantum vulnerable parts are signatures, as value transfer is based on signatures, the unspent transactions are vulnerable. If quantum computing progresses to a point where the signature algorithm is in imminent jeopardy, the signature algorithm needs to be updated to a quantum resistant one. Moreover, all owners of unspent transactions need to transfer values to the new scheme. This action also needs to be done before the signature scheme is broken. Further, it will need actions from all owners of value to safeguard their assets. This also applies to other forms of asset ownership assertion using asymmetric or public key cryptography. Some of these considerations can be seen in the plans for Ethereum Serenity upgrades.

Once quantum computing for factorization becomes a reality, all stranded assets; for which private keys are lost due to negligence or their owners death will start moving again, into the control of people with enough quantum resources.

Facilities for upgrading systems should be part of the initial architecture of any long-lived system. There are many throw-away systems that long outlive the initial horizon, so any system has to be created as if it is going to live a long time.

See the rest here:
Satoshi Nakamoto Inspiration Gives Advice On Bitcoins Next Move - Forbes