The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is reportedly developing a “quantum computer” that could crack different encryption worldwide.
The Washington Post reports Thursday that the NSA is working on a “cryptologically useful quantum computer” that can break encryption codes utilized to shield important and confidential records worldwide.
According to NSA’s leaked documents, the “quantum computer” is a part of the federal agency’s “Penetrating Hard Targets” project worth $79.7 million.
However, though the federal agency has worked hard to weaken usual encryption standards, it is still no closer to success compared to any other efforts in the scientific community.
“The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the U.S government’s ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments,” written in the confidential document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The leaked documents also implied that the NSA facilitates some of the research in secured spacious rooms specially created to protect electromagnetic energy from going in and out “to keep delicate quantum computing experiments running.”
While a classic computer uses binary bits, or zeroes and one, and calculates one at a time, a quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which are simultaneously zero and one, and can achieve a correct answer faster and more efficiently through parallel processing without the need of running those calculations.
However, the complexity in quantum computing is with the particles that make up such computers that must be cautiously detached from outside environments.
Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology at the University of Southern California, told the Washington Post, “Quantum computers are extremely delicate, so if you don’t protect them from their environment, then the computation will be useless.”
Experts said ten years ago that the development of a huge quantum computer was a decade to century away. But five years ago, Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at MIT, said that the development could only take a decade.
He told the Washington Post, “I don’t think we’re likely to have the type of quantum computer the NSA wants within at least five years, in the absence of a significant breakthrough maybe much longer.”
The leaked documents revealed that the NSA expects to have a basic architecture of the quantum device by September 2014.
