Privacy Please
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Privacy Please
S6, E235 - Exploring Microsoft's Majorana Quantum Chip and the Future of Cybersecurity
The emergence of quantum computing presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for data security and privacy. As Microsoft reveals its new quantum chip, the industry must prepare for the significant threats that stable quantum computing poses to existing encryption methods.
• Microsoft announces a new quantum processing chip
• Potential risks to encryption and data security
• Industry skepticism toward claims of rapid advancements
• Understanding the mechanics of quantum computing
• Implications of quantum technology for various sectors
• The need for proactive planning and strategy for security professionals
All righty then. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Privacy. Please, Cameron Ivey, here with Gabe Gumbs, we're just hanging out chatting. Got some pretty cool things to talk about today, but before we get into that, Gabe, how you doing man?
Speaker 2:My friend, how are you? How are you?
Speaker 1:Doing well, doing well. Life moves on. Yeah can't complain. It's getting hotter here in Florida while people have snowstorms, so I don't know whether to be Well, actually it's getting a little colder again randomly this week, so I guess I'll take it.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree, as the weather goes, I'll settle for slightly chilly, and you know, above 70, but below 80. Yeah, no one wants to hear us complain about our warm weather. No, no, sorry, we don't want to be that podcast, anyways, especially when they're freezing. But I hear it's raining quantum computers out, it is. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We've talked about this many, many times on the podcast over the years. You specifically, and that's our topic today. So if anybody hasn't seen yet, about Microsoft, yeah, they had a big one chip announcement, so let's kind of dig into thatadella he announced earlier today in fact that Microsoft was able to prototype a new quantum processing chip using a topological core called Majorana M-A-J-O-R-A-N-A.
Speaker 2:Majorana Majorana.
Speaker 1:Majorana.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, is how that's properly pronounced, and so we have talked about this on the show before right. Like we cover security and privacy and quantum, the development of quantum computing is going to affect both quite significantly, Quite significantly. On the privacy and security side, as we've always talked about, one cannot have security without privacy. So once we have stable quantum computing, we will be able to break existing ethical encryption. So you know, think RSA, ECC, Diffie-Hellman, right, Like those are going to pose significant threats to banking communications, government communications, VPNs as we know them, SSL, TLS, All of the internet security just foundational basics are at risk and they're at risk of attacks like Harvest Now, Decrypt Later. So suck up all of the sensitive data you can today that is encrypted and decrypt it later. It's possible that quantum computing could also compromise blockchain and cryptocurrency security, which today enjoys a lot of relatively, I'd say it enjoys at least a perception of a lot of security cryptocurrencies and blockchain. But just imagine all of the things you know about crypto today and how volatile it is and the problems with it, and then you wake up tomorrow and someone's able to reverse engineer private keys, allowing a hacker to steal cryptocurrency or to forge a transaction. That's just ridiculous. Imagine an AI-powered cyber attack right With quantum speed. So the ability to password, crack and brute force attacks with that kind of quantum speed. The list of threats is fairly significant when we get to stable quantum computing.
Speaker 2:I do want to just say right off the bat that this announcement certainly is met with a bit of skepticism in the professional community. I am no physicist, certainly no quantum physicist, but no type of physicist whatsoever, Although looking at the responses from around the physics community, you know a lot of people are slightly grumpy, that, like you know, look, this looks like a lot of hype and marketing. They're not wrong, but I think they're missing the point, the point. I think the number one takeaway from this announcement is it certainly seems to me that it's a safe assumption that we are not decades plural away from stable quantum computing. We're not decades. This kind of breakthrough really suggests that we are years away. Maybe it's 10 years, but it's not 20. It's not 20.
Speaker 1:I mean, for the longest time it's been what 2030 was the estimate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've heard that number thrown around for like 20 or 30 years. For those, that's fair. Okay, so we are coming up on that timeframe. But, like in the last five years, like five years ago there were people probably still saying we were 20 years out, and I think some of those folks weren't really accounting for just how fast we would have been able to make this type of progress. But here we are. That type of progress has been made.
Speaker 2:To break this down in the terms for those not fully tracking what in the devil any of this quantum computing stuff means is think about at the core how computer chips operate on ones and zeros today, right, like, just all of those bits represent all those little electrical pulses, represent either a state of a zero or one and combined, you know, we create machine code from that and on top of that machine code we have computer code, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Well, quantum computers, qubits quantum bits, as opposed to regular computing bits, have the ability to be both a zero and a one at the same time. That's what gives them the ability to perform so many computations. The problem has been creating a quantum chip that is stable, right, so it's able to continuously run, and that doesn't have a bunch of errors. What Microsoft has proven at a small scale is that they can create a quantum chip that is relatively stable and doesn't seem to have a lot of errors. The next step in developing this is making that actually happen at computing scale like actually making that happen at computing scale. So that's a significant hurdle to overcome. The next hurdle to overcome is in getting whatever chip we create as humans to interact with classical computing right, like the OG zeros, and one computing right, like having that hybrid infrastructure and hybrid computing of the two. I think that last step will actually be easier than the first of making it stable.
Speaker 1:But are we talking about the topo conductors and quibbets? Yes, yes, we are.
Speaker 2:The topo conductor is the infrastructure with which those qubits are running.
Speaker 1:And so just play with me here the particles to create. Obviously, the long game is to create them to be more reliable and scalable. Qubits. Yes kind of like. That's probably more of the. This is kind of a breakthrough, because they've found something that's potentially able to do that at a certain point. Right, right, but it's still not. It's still kind of questionable, right? It's still not it is questionable.
Speaker 2:Two more things that are notable here. I think too, though, in terms of it's. For those that are kind of hand-waving, this away is just, like you know, marketing FUD. Microsoft is working in collaboration with DARPA on this. Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the one and very same agency that created what we created the seeds for what we call the internet today. Right Like the one and same very agency, which is to say Some of the world's smartest people are certainly on this problem.
Speaker 2:I know it's a hard problem, but suggesting that it is that far away at this point, I think, is not wise. The second is Microsoft used a method that first theorized, so it's not like the community hasn't been thinking about ways to do this for decades. We are coming up on what's that? 85 plus years since that first theoretical presumption that we could use these types of particles. That's almost a century. It's really kind of foolhardy to say after a century. Looking at this, yeah, we're still another century away. That might be true for some problems like time travel, which might be impossible ever. But who knows, maybe quantum computing opens up time travel. We don't know the answer to that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, that takes me to commercial applications. What does this mean, gabe, when you see something like this? What does it mean for the potential of quantum computing when it comes to, like I'm seeing self-healing materials, breaking down plastics and advancements in healthcare? Is that something that comes to your mind first, or what do you think? What is your process on that?
Speaker 2:I mean, my brain doesn't personally go right to things like breaking down plastics, probably because I just don't think about it that way.
Speaker 1:But I understand. What does that mean, though?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I understand that, though right, breaking down plastics is very much a it's a chemistry problem, and so today we run lots of large models trying to figure out chemical interactions.
Speaker 2:The pharma world does this quite a bit right, like we're always trying to discover new drugs, and the way that happens is by taking large computing models and feeding them these different ways that they interact and trying to figure out how they affect different molecules, et cetera, different proteins and so on and so forth. Quantum computing gives us the ability to do that a thousand times faster. Warp speed, warp speed, yeah, and a thousand is probably not even the right measure, but yeah, exactly. So it took us decades to figure out what chemical compounds we needed to break down a plastic, even unsafely. We could probably get to that safer now, much quicker, and so what you're really pressing on is this type of computing can help us solve all kinds of problems. If you were trying to put them in big categories of buckets, anything that took computational kind of assessment, right. Like we have to compare lots of results, like we have to keep trying and iterating on, like all right, how about this, how about that one, how about?
Speaker 1:this one.
Speaker 2:Any of those types of functions will now be on absolute steroids. I mean, we're talking 1990s baseball levels of steroids.
Speaker 1:Sammy Sosa, we're talking. Sosa levels of steroids oh my gosh, those were such fun times, those were the days those were the days.
Speaker 2:Home run derby Mark McGuire McGuire levels of steroids.
Speaker 1:Yes, home Run Derby, mark McGuire, mcguire, levels of steroids. Yes, gosh, barry Bonds. Everybody, even anyone that likes sports, that didn't even like baseball, still enjoyed those times. Yeah, bring it back, why not?
Speaker 2:It makes it more fun Continuing that analogy. It's not like these gentlemen were not ridiculous power hitters to begin with. Right, right, you take someone like a Barry Bonds, barry.
Speaker 1:Bonds to begin with right, right, like.
Speaker 2:You take someone like a barry bonds, like a sandy sosa who's already smacking balls out of the the the park and you give them juice, and like the analogy is the same right like right. Yeah, you take these incredibly brilliant models and you throw more force power at the models.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a good analogy. Yeah, could you imagine if they did that if king griffey jr had taken steroids? He was, I mean, he had massive legs, I mean that's that's where good analogy. Yeah, could you imagine if they did that if Ken Griffey Jr had taken steroids? I mean, he had massive legs, I mean that's where a lot of his power Junior and senior.
Speaker 2:If those boys were juiced up, forget about it.
Speaker 1:I remember that home run derby with Ken Griffey Jr where he annihilated balls over a light stirrer.
Speaker 2:He was juiced up. He could have played center, left and right field alone.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, this is incredible, gabe, I know we're kind of coming up on time here, but because we could talk about this and maybe we'll bring somebody on, that's maybe a little bit got more background on this on the physics side, that'd be interesting. Yeah, so what we did?
Speaker 2:was. We reached out to a couple of actual quantum physicists. See if we can get them on the show. Yeah, quantum physicists see if we can get them on the show. We've talked about this with other security professionals and amongst ourselves for a while, and although I have a passing knowledge of it air quotes, asterisk on passing, and many of our guests had more than a passing I really want to, as we're getting this close to reality. I want to hear from an actual quantum physicist of like tell me what the threat really looks like. But for those of us living in privacy and security space, here's the takeaway You've got to be planning for that inevitability right now. If you're a CISO, if you're chief data officer, you already make plans on a three to five year horizon. As it is, your three to five year horizon should at least have the early stages of a plan. If it doesn't, that's problematic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we'll take away from that and again, hopefully we'll have somebody that can come on the show and we'll talk a little bit deeper about this, because I have a lot of questions Me too.
Speaker 2:This is super interesting.
Speaker 1:Hope you guys enjoyed it and if you have questions, send them our way. Anything, and we appreciate you being along for the ride. We'll see you guys next week. See you.
