Thursday, June 28, 2012

Researchers report solid-state quantum leaps

Researchers report solid-state quantum leaps:

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Researchers report solid-state quantum leaps

R. Colin Johnson

6/27/2012 6:36 PM EDT

PORTLAND, Ore.—Separate labs in the U.S. and Europe recently reported progress in adapting solid-state materials to store spintronic quantum states, a critical hurdle on the path to using spintronics in quantum computing.

Many researchers believe that spintronics for quantum computing is the most promising way forward for future computer chips, but few have reliably cast them into solid-state materials. Unfortunately, the most successful experiments today use ultra-cold gases to store quantum spin-states. However, semiconductor R&D labs worldwide are aiming to recast spintronics into traditional solid-state materials.

Researchers at the City College of New York (CCNY) and the University of California-Berkeley (UCB) reported success using laser light to encode the spin-state of atomic nuclei on gallium arsenide chips. Using a technique whereby a scanning laser defines the spin-states on a gallium arsenide chip, the researchers claim they can set-up the initial conditions for a quantum computation that can be quickly reconfigured after completion.

The technique amounts to soft lithography, since it can reconfigure each quantum computation on-the-fly, according to the researchers. The group includes UC Berkeley professor Jeffrey Reimer and CCNY professor Carlos Meriles, along doctoral candiates Jonathan King of UC Berkeley and Yunpu Li of CCNY.

Such rewritable quantum computers would use the laser to encode their spin-states, thus suppressing the tendency of solid-state materials to lose their magnetization during computations. The researchers are currently experimenting with push-pull architectures that the laser could set in order to ensure that the quantum spintronic states remain stable until the end of a computation.

Separately, the current record holders for maintaining a quantum state in a solid-state material recently surpassed their own record, reporting encoded spin states that lasted over three minutes. The researchers at Simon Fraser University and Oxford University reported a 100-time improvement over their 2008 report of 1.75 seconds. Because their solid-state material is conventional silicon, professor Mike Thewalt at Simon Fraser (Canada) and professor John Morton at Oxford (U.K.) claim their technique could enable conventional CMOS manufacturing to eventually be harnessed for future quantum computers.

Both research groups encoded quantum states on the magnetic spin of atomic nuclei, on gallium arsenide and silicon chips respectively, rather than the more conventional approach of encoding spin states on electrons.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Stuxnet cyberattack by US a 'destabilizing and dangerous' course of action, security expert Bruce Schneier says - PC Advisor

Stuxnet cyberattack by US a 'destabilizing and dangerous' course of action, security expert Bruce Schneier says - PC Advisor:

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Stuxnet cyberattack by US a 'destabilizing and dangerous' course of action, security expert Bruce Schneier says

By Ellen Messmer | Network World US | 18 June 12

Revelations by The New York Times that President Barack Obama in his role as commander in chief ordered the Stuxnet cyberattack against Iran's uranium-enrichment facility two years ago in cahoots with Israel is generating controversy, with Washington in an uproar over national-security leaks. But the important question is whether this covert action of sabotage against Iran, the first known major cyberattack authorized by a U.S. president, is the right course for the country to take. Are secret cyberattacks helping the U.S. solve geopolitical problems or actually making things worse?

RELATED ARTICLES

Bruce Schneier, noted security expert and author, whose most recent book is "Liars and Outliers," argues the U.S. made a mistake with Stuxnet, and he discusses why it's important for the world to tackle cyber-arms control now in an interview with Network World senior editor Ellen Messmer.

SLIDESHOW: Worst data breaches of 2012 -- so far

The question is going to be debated whether Stuxnet was a good tactic to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon by sabotaging its facility through a malware attack in a covert action that was ultimately discovered. In an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News last night, former National Security Agency director, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, said he thought it amounted to "taunting Iran." Based on the mix of military leadership, governmental leadership and ethical questions it raises, is Stuxnet a suitable approach?

There are two parts to this analysis. The first is tactical: Is a cyber-weapon more or less suitable than a conventional weapon? In 2007 Israel attacked a Syrian nuclear facility; it was a conventional attack with warplanes and bombs. Comparing the two, Stuxnet seems far more humane -- even though it damaged networks outside of Iran. The other part to the analysis is more strategic. Stuxnet didn't just damage the Natanz nuclear facility; it damaged the U.S.'s credibility as a fair arbiter and force for peace in cyberspace. Its effects will be felt as other countries ramp up their offensive cyberspace capabilities in response. For that reason, Stuxnet was a destabilizing and dangerous course of action.

David Sanger's NY Times article of June 1, headlined "Obama order sped up wave of cyberattacks against Iran," offers a vivid account of how President Obama decided cyberattacks against Iran should proceed through cooperation with Israel through use of the Stuxnet malware. However effective this might have been in stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, it's now widely thought that the Stuxnet malware got out of control, spreading in the wild. What's your view on this, assuming the Times article is fully accurate?

It seems to be correct.

Sanger's article was very interesting, and it is worth reading, but it basically confirmed everything we all knew. We knew that Stuxnet was the work of Israel and the United States. We knew that it was intended as a pinpoint attack, and spread beyond its intended target. Other investigative journalists uncovered these truths already. What Sanger's article added to the discussion was detail about the program from inside both the Obama and the Bush administrations.

Richard Clarke's book "Cyber War" draws the distinction between cyber-espionage and cyberattacks. He argues cyber-espionage should basically be considered a routine, acceptable practice of any country as part of government intelligence operations. But he argues other state-sponsored operations, such as putting malware secretly into a power grid for example, or launching an actual attack, is distinctly different, and has to be considered in the realm of offensive weapons. Clarke suggests cyberweapons should be subject to arms control agreements of various sorts much as other types of weapons that can be used in war are today. Do you draw the distinction between cyber-espionage and cyberweapons along these lines? And should there be an effort by the U.S. and others to craft treaties related to cyber-arms?

Of course there's a difference between intelligence gathering and offensive military actions. Throughout history, there has been a bright line between the two. And what's true in the geopolitics of the physical world is no different in cyberspace. This same distinction also exists in computer security more generally. There is a fundamental difference between passive eavesdropping attacks and more active attacks that delete or overwrite data. As to arms control agreements, I think it is vital for both society and cyberspace that we begin these discussions now. We're in the early years of a cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will be expensive, destabilizing, and dangerously damaging. It will lead to the militarization of cyberspace, and the transformation of the Internet into something much less free and open. Perhaps it's too late to reverse this trend -- certainly you can argue that military grade cyberweapons like Stuxnet and Flame have already destroyed the U.S.'s credibility as a leader for a free and open Internet -- but the only chance we have are cyberweapons treaties.

If so, how do you think that should proceed?

I'm not an idealist. I know that cyberwar treaties will be difficult to negotiate and even more difficult to enforce. Given how easy it is for a country to hide a chemical weapons plant, I know that it will be even easier to hide a cyberweapons plant. I also know that there is a lot of money and power trying to sow cyberwar fears.

But even with all of this, I think there is enormous value in the treaty process -- and in the treaties themselves. I think we need to proceed by starting the dialogue. We made a mistake with Stuxnet: We traded a small short-term gain for a large longer-term loss. We can't undo that, but we can do better in the future.

Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section.

Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it | Ars Technica

Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it | Ars Technica:

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Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

Stuxnet was never meant to propagate in the wild.

by Nate Anderson - June 1 2012, 3:00am PDT

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The new account is unlikely to alter Iran's view of the US, seen here in a mural on the old US embassy in Tehran

David Holt

In 2011, the US government rolled out its "International Strategy for Cyberspace," which reminded us that "interconnected networks link nations more closely, so an attack on one nation’s networks may have impact far beyond its borders." An in-depth report today from the New York Times confirms the truth of that statement as it finally lays bare the history and development of the Stuxnet virus—and how it accidentally escaped from the Iranian nuclear facility that was its target.

The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger's forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment by issuing specific commands to the industrial control hardware responsible for their spin rate. By doing so, both governments hoped to set back the Iranian research program—and the US hoped to keep Israel from launching a pre-emptive military attack.

The code was only supposed to work within Iran's Natanz refining facility, which was air-gapped from outside networks and thus difficult to penetrate. But computers and memory cards could be carried between the public Internet and the private Natanz network, and a preliminary bit of "beacon" code was used to map out all the network connections within the plant and report them back to the NSA.

That program, first authorized by George W. Bush, worked well enough to provide a digital map of Natanz and its industrial control hardware. Soon, US national labs were testing different bits of the plan to sabotage Natanz (apparently without knowing what the work was for) using similar centrifuges that had come from Libya's Qadaffi regime. When the coders found the right sets of commands to literally shake the centrifuges apart, they knew that Stuxnet could work.

When ready, Stuxnet was introduced to Natanz, perhaps by a double agent.

Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others—both spies and unwitting accomplices—with physical access to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.”
In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code.

When Barack Obama came to office, he continued the program—called "Olympic Games"—which unpredictably disabled bits of the Natanz plant even as it told controllers that everything was normal. But in 2010, Stuxnet escaped Natanz, probably on someone's laptop; once connected to the outside Internet, it did what it was designed not to do: spread in public. The blame game began about who had slipped up in the coding.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”
Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

Once released more widely, the Stuxnet code was found and then disassembled by security researchers.

Please don't follow our example

As the International Strategy for Cyberspace notes, these sorts of electronic attacks are serious business. The US in fact reserves the right to use even military force to respond to similar attacks. "All states possess an inherent right to self-defense, and we recognize that certain hostile acts conducted through cyberspace could compel actions under the commitments we have with our military treaty partners," says the report. "We reserve the right to use all necessary means—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law."

Yet the US had just gone on the cyber-attack, and everyone knew it. Speculation has long swirled around government-backed hackers from nations like China and Russia, especially, who have been suspected of involvement in espionage, industrial trade secret theft, and much else. Would something like Stuxnet damage US credibility when it complained about such attacks? (China has long adopted the "you do it too!" defense on Internet issues, especially when it comes to censoring and filtering of Internet content.)

Obama was at least aware of the likely answer—yes—but pressed ahead, even accelerating the Olympic Games program.

[Obama] repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons—even under the most careful and limited circumstances—could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks. “We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said.

Stuxnet is old news by now. Even the newly discovered "Flame" malware was developed some time ago. While details about these two targeted attack packages are finally emerging, the next generation of attack tools has no doubt been developed and likely deployed.

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Closing In on the Reality Of Quantum Computing - NYTimes.com

Closing In on the Reality Of Quantum Computing - NYTimes.com:

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Advance in Quantum Computing Entangles Particles by the Billions - NYTimes.com

Advance in Quantum Computing Entangles Particles by the Billions - NYTimes.com:

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Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing Promises New Insights - NYTimes.com

Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing Promises New Insights - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/scott-aaronson-quantum-computing-promises-new-insights.html

Stevens Researcher Tackles Obstacle to Quantum Computing | Virtual-Strategy Magazine

Advancing quantum computing

Advancing quantum computing:

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European researchers have made important advances in understanding the major stumbling block to realisation of quantum computers, a phenomenon known as decoherence.

The quest for quantum computers capable of performing tremendously complex calculations extremely quickly based on the exciting properties of quantum particleshas faced a major roadblock in the form of ‘decoherence’.

Whereas traditional computers rely on traditional ‘bits’ to code information, quantum computers rely on quantum bits, or qubits. Unlike traditional bits that are either 0 or 1, qubits can be both simultaneously via superposition, theoretically enabling truly parallel processing and tremendously increasing computing capability.

However, decoherence, or random changes in quantum states as a result of interactions with the environment, makes it difficult to control and exploit qubits.

For magnetic molecules, theory predicts three main contributions to decoherence, namely from nuclear spins, from intermolecular dipolar interactions and from phonons.

European researchers initiated the ‘Decoherence in magnetic molecules as qubits’ (DECMMQUBIT) project in order to study the above phenomena in spin qubit systems of molecular magnets. The goal was to enhance understanding and minimisation of decoherence to advance the frontiers of quantum computing.As a first step, scientists chose two molecules (polyoxometalates) capable of being synthesised without nuclear spins. Theoretical studies demonstrated that they were quite likely to show single-molecule magnet (SMM) behaviour and thus were excellent candidates for spin qubits. The SMMs were subsequently synthesised and magnetically characterised.

The next stage was to prepare pure and magnetically diluted samples with which they demonstrated that application of a transverse magnetic field significantly decreased the contribution of dipolar interactions to decoherence.

Finally, coupling constants between phonons (quanta of vibrational energy) and different types of potassium bromide (KBr), cyanide (CN) two level systems were studied, with calculations supporting experimentally measured values.

Overall, DECMMQUBIT project researchers carried out experimental and theoretical studies on the three main contributors to decoherence of qubits. Continuation of the project findings should further facilitate understanding of magnetic molecules as quantum objects and help break down the existing barrier to future quantum computer development.

Monday, June 11, 2012

6 Government Surveillance Programs Designed to Watch What You Do Online | | AlterNet

6 Government Surveillance Programs Designed to Watch What You Do Online | | AlterNet:

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