This also means that a failure in the communication channel
cannot cause an information leak. Hence, a quantum com-
puter is the most promising system to safeguard privacy in
the future, for both communications and public cloud
computing.
Quantum computing can therefore find many uses in finan-
cial services applications, pharmaceutical research, block-
chain, pure science research or any use case that involves
large, simultaneous computing.
Quantum Cryptography Is Already Here
In January 2018, a joint China-Austria team demonstrated
that communication between continents with quantum
encryption was possible. It is the first practical proof that
the technology that allows net-
works to use quantum encryp-
tion is already available. Com-
mercial implementations may
not be too far behind.
Quantum computers are expected to play an important
future role in information processing, since they can out-
perform classical computers at many tasks. Considering the
challenges inherent in building quantum devices, it is con-
ceivable that future quantum computing capabilities will
exist only in a few specialized facilities around the world –
much like today’s supercomputers. Users would interact
with those specialized facilities to outsource their quantum
computations. This scenario follows the current trend of
cloud computing: using central remote servers to store and
process data – doing everything in the cloud. Companies
such as Microsoft, IBM and Google provide quantum cloud
offerings for researchers. Their obvious challenge is to
make globalized computing safe, ensuring that users’ data
stays private.
The latest research reveals that
quantum computers can provide
an answer to that challenge. Quan-
tum technology solves one of the
key issues in distributed comput-
ing: it can preserve data privacy
when users interact with remote
computing centers. This newly
established fundamental advan-
tage of quantum computers lets
you delegate a quantum computa-
tion from a user who does not hold
any quantum computational
power to a quantum server, while
guaranteeing that the user’s data
remains perfectly private. The
quantum server performs the calculations, but has no
means to find out what it is doing, a functionality not
achievable in classical computing.
Quantum computers
are expected to play
an important future
role in information
processing, since
they can outperform
classical computers
at many tasks.
Researchers in the Vienna Cen-
ter for Quantum Science and
Technology have succeeded in
combining the power of quan-
tum computing with the secu-
rity of quantum cryptography,
to show that perfectly secure
cloud computing can be
achieved using the principles of
quantum mechanics. They per-
formed
an
experimental
demonstration of quantum computation in which the input,
the data processing and the output remained unknown to
the quantum computer. Called “blind quantum computing,”
their work was published in Science magazine.
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