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Malware In Quantum Computing?
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 24, 2006 01:32 PM
from the not-too-early-to-think-about-it dept.
from the not-too-early-to-think-about-it dept.
MattSparkes writes, "Today's quantum computers are not sophisticated enough to do anything malicious to your online bank account; the field is in its infancy. However, there are in theory more ways to attack quantum computers than classical ones. As quantum networking takes off, this is going to become a larger and more immediate problem." The Wikipedia article correctly identifies as an unsolved problem in physics the question of whether it is possible to construct a practical computer that performs calculations on qubits.
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saavyone writes to tell us Yahoo! News is reporting that while teleportation may not quite be a reality yet a team of Danish scientists have raised the bar on this line of research. From the article: "The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further. 'Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,' Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained. 'Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,' he added."
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Links (Score:3, Funny)
(must post anonymously so people don't figure out I RTFA)
Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:2)
Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:4, Funny)
When your AV program detects it, it flies off and infects someone else's computer.
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Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:5, Funny)
No, that's Windows Quantum Advantage: If Redmond observes that your copy of Windows Quantum is not Genuine, a hammer will break a vial of cyanide inside your PC, and your cat will die.
Quantum malware is what your dog installs to introduce sufficient uncertainty in Redmond's WQA check to ensure your cat's demise. (After all, when your cat's momentum is known to be precisely zero, it's gotta be somewhere around your PC.)
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Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:5, Funny)
And if it's anything like my cat, it almost always will indeed have a momentum of precisely zero.
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Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:4, Funny)
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Simple solution (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As long as you don't put all 32 qubits into a superposition, you'll be fine. Otherwise you may be forced to pay the licensing fee to run it on 4,294,967,296 CPUs.
Obligatory: quantum virus... (Score:4, Funny)
Where there are worms... (Score:2, Funny)
These are normally found where there is an abundance of tachyon emissions.
Make a sensor for those and we can remove the wormholes and finally get rid of the worms.
QED
blue sky speculation (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this really even a story? We may as well be worrying about where to buy reliable crossbows once the atomic wars destroy civilization.
yes it is too early to think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but when immortality becomes possible, just think of the new pressures on the Earth's resources. Yet I'm going to bet those irresponsible doctor and medical researcher types haven't thought at all about this as they try to cure cancer and so forth.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A layman's take on this article (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I am a self proclaimed computer geek. The main benefit of quantum computers, as I understand it, is an exponential leap in computing power and storage of such systems. If I understand correctly, a qubit can be altered by it's environment and change it's state, thus ruining it's data. I fail to see how this differs from computers today. Run a magnet over a hard drive enough times and good by data. Hard drives fail and lose data all the time, but we have sophisticated data checking algorythms designed to catch this kind of thing so that it doesn't get out of hand. It looks like they are doing something similar here.
I don't understand how one creates a worm with this either. If you know qubit for qubit, what data you want to change, then perhaps, but that requires knowing the qubits ahead of time, doesn't it? Same way with bits today. People create worms due to vulnerabilities within the hardware and software that they can program in. I know of no viruses which rewrite data specifically on their knowledge of ones and zeros.
Could a worm try to attack the physical nature of a quantum computer and run the data by physically attacking it? I don't know in quantum computers, but maybe that's what they are saying. The article is sufficiently arcane that it's difficult to see if it's just an attempt at fear mongering among us lessers, by saying "ooooo quantum computers are vulnerable to worms!" or if there is any real value to this article.
A quantum to english translator is needed
Re:A layman's take on this article (Score:4, Funny)
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Windows Uncertainty Principle (Score:3, Funny)
Quantum Norton Antivirus? (Score:2, Funny)
Somewhat Offtopic (Score:2)
Re:Somewhat Offtopic (Score:5, Informative)
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Future Quantum Nerd Problems (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
My pr0n-collection has wormholed itself to another dimension :(
HAWT! Did you get video?A load of crap ? (Score:2, Funny)
I kinda wondered how somthing can be in two positions at once, then I thought about how the water in a toilet spins in different directions on either side of the earth.
So in a sense, we're basicly looking for a way to get smaller versions of us to flush their toilets when we want them to.
I guess looking at it like that, malware in quantum computing would be the turds in our toilets that clog them up.
We must ask the cats, as they have been observin
Hacking quantum computers ought to be trivial (Score:3, Funny)
How are you going to defend against that?
Re:Virus Destroys Universe (Score:5, Funny)
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