By Katie Hunt, CNN
(CNN) — Years before emails, internet banking, cloud servers and cryptocurrency wallets, two scientists devised a way to keep secrets perfectly safe and indecipherable to eavesdropping outsiders.
Their 1984 work depended on the hidden, counterintuitive world of quantum physics, which governs the way the world works at the smallest, subatomic scale, rather than complex but theoretically breakable mathematical codes to secure data.
The insights of Charles Bennett, an American physicist who is a fellow at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, have since transformed cryptography and computing. The pair received the A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work on quantum key cryptography. Named after the late mathematician and wartime codebreaker Alan Mathison Turin, who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing, the honor is widely considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.
“Cryptography is a fundamental pillar of the global economy and our safety and our security and our sovereignty. It’s really the invisible background plumbing,” said Michele Mosca, cofounder and CEO of cybersecurity company evolutionQ and a professor at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He said it is “wonderful” that Bennett and Brassard have won the award, which comes with a $1 million prize.
Bennett and Brassard initially struggled to get their work taken seriously, but it has since taken on more urgency and significance. Security experts fear what’s known as “Q day” or quantum day: the development of a quantum computer powerful enough to hack the mathematical encryption keys, such as RSA, that currently keep most internet communication safe, potentially resulting in the biggest release of secrets in history.
Internet security is currently based on public key encryption that essentially relies on a quirk of math: While multiplying numbers is relatively easy, the inverse of that process — factorizing — is not.
However, it’s possible a full-scale quantum computer, which many experts say will be feasible in the mid-2030s, has the potential to crack the mathematical codes that protect sensitive information. This breakthrough could result in huge breaches in the security of communications over the internet, Brassard said.
Quantum computers work in a completely different way than typical machines today, which store and process information in bits, using a language made up of zeros and ones. Quantum computers use “quantum bits,” also known as “qubits,” which can behave like zero and one simultaneously, a quantum state known as superposition. In theory, this ability will allow quantum computers to process information much more quickly.
With current computing, a padlock symbol in your internet browser is a symbol that suggests that a transaction or exchange is taking place securely, Brassard said. “But this is given to you by techniques that are completely broken or will be by a quantum computer when we have one.”
Bad actors may already be collecting encrypted data, with a view to “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, Brassard, Mosca and other analysts have noted, in which all information can be taken down, stored and decrypted when a quantum computer is available.
The quantum key cryptography conceived by Brassard and Bennett, however, allows information to be transmitted in a fundamentally secure way that can’t be hacked, not even with a quantum computer.
Breaking down BB84
In a protocol named BB84 after their initials and the year of its publication, Brassard and Bennett demonstrated that two parties wanting to share sensitive data could establish a secure encryption key with secrecy ensured by the laws of physics, not the computational difficulty of a mathematical problem. The approach involves using photons of light to establish a secret key between two parties. Rather than directly encrypting data, it creates a secure channel for communication.
The quantum nature of the light photons means that if anyone tries to intercept the signal, it will immediately change the signal’s state, a property that makes any hacking or eavesdropping attempt immediately detectable.
“This means that we can share information with an assurance that it has not been overheard by somebody else,” Bennett said.
Before their breakthrough, Bennett said that quantum effects, while interesting to study, were not really thought to have any useful application in computing.
“They thought of them as things that were important for chemistry and physics in the laboratory, maybe for philosophy, but in a practical sense, they were a nuisance,” he said, referring to other computer scientists.
The Association for Computing Machinery, which confers the Turing Award with financial support from Google, described BB84 as “a transformative moment in the history of computer science” and said the pair’s research helped catalyze a generation of physicists and computer scientists.
“Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself,” Yannis Ioannidis, the association’s president, said in a news release. “The global momentum behind quantum technologies today underscores the enduring importance of their contributions.”
Ahead of their time
Brassard recalled that he and Bennett first attempted to make their work public in the early 1980s at a conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery but got rejected. Eventually, they made their work public at a conference in India.
“The first time we tried to submit our ideas in the world, it was rejected by the organization that gives us this prize,” Brassard joked.
Mosca said the duo’s work felt like science fiction when he first came across it in the early 1990s, but today several cybersecurity companies use the approach for products that help keep data-carrying networks secure.
While quantum cryptography is “the ultimate future-proofing against code-breaking attacks,” Mosca said it requires specially purposed hardware that for now makes it hard to deploy very widely. Thus, he said, mathematical approaches to cryptography will still be needed for the foreseeable future.
“What Gilles and Charlie discovered is a quantum channel to communicate,” Mosca said. “It’s really magical. You need the quantum properties of nature to be able to not rely on a mathematical assumption.”
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