Perhaps the biggest miracle of the Internet is that we are able to establish secure and verifiable communication with trusted third parties which we have never met. Take for example your banking application: how do you trust that the third party you are interacting with is actually your bank? Through scams, users can in fact be directed to press links to websites which are a replica of the bank鈥檚 website. However, as long as you visit the right domain name and you establish a secure connection with the bank鈥檚 website (the padlock symbol on your browser signifies this), you can be confident that you are indeed communicating with your bank.
Technologically speaking, this is no mean feat and, whether you realise it or not, this is only possible through some mathematical magic that is happening in the background relying on functions which are easy to compute in one direction, but astronomically expensive in the other. It鈥檚 like when you find it easy to mix two bags of sand together, but unthinkably difficult to separate them again.
Yet, as with many things that we have taken for granted in the past, new technologies are challenging the security of these well established communication protocols. Quantum computers have been making significant progress over the past years and theoretically they are able to solve (significantly more) efficiently some mathematical problems for which there is no known efficient solution with current technology. This is leading the relevant academic communities to revisit the protocols and upgrade them for quantum-safety. This can range from doubling the key size, to finding new mathematical functions, to rethinking whole communication protocols.
Through a NATO funded project, Maltese computer scientists Dr Christian Colombo and Dr Mark Vella from the University of Malta have joined forces with other international collaborators on the establishment of Secure Communication in the . As the project is drawing to a close, it has joined forces with the Quantum Computing Group at the University of Malta, chaired by Prof John Abela, to organise a webinar on Wednesday 6 July at 10am where Prof Tomas Fab拧i膷 from the Slovak University of Technology will be explaining in digestible tech language how quantum technology affects your communication security, and what you need to do to stay on top of things.
