Marcos Curty is a doctor in Telecommunications and does not have a cell phone. He assures that it is a personal and considered decision. He is 47 years old and has set out to turn his hometown, Vigo, into a quantum world capital on account of security, one of the great challenges of this technology due to the vulnerabilities that can be opened and the impregnable defenses that are sought. . Throughout his international academic career, this professor of Signal Theory and Communications has rubbed shoulders with the greatest experts in the sector, who are the ones that now make up, under the coordination of Curty, the Quantum-Safe Internet network, the plan European training in cybersecurity, and the Quantum Communication Centerthe research complex in which companies and universities from a dozen countries participate to place the Galician city on the quantum world map with a budget of close to 10 million euros, financed by the Ministry of Science and the Galician regional government, in addition to European funds for research and aid from companies such as Cisco.
Ask. Is the current system secure?
Answer. The security of our communications is protected by methods called cryptographic. They are used every day in applications to connect to the internet, to the bank… And we want to be sure that nobody is going to access that data. In government, business or military communications we also need security for our communications and, above all, confidentiality, so that no one can access the information that we transmit over the network beyond the recipient. And as the amount of information we transmit over open communications networks is increasing significantly, it is even more important to protect that information. Today, public key cryptography methods are mainly used, whose security is based on the difficulty of solving certain mathematical problems. With quantum computers, many problems will be easy to solve and some of them are precisely these functions that are used in cryptography.
With quantum computers, many problems will be easy to solve and some of them are precisely these functions that are used in cryptography.
Q. Peter Shor, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already warned 30 years ago that a quantum computer could solve a factorization problem efficiently.
R. That implies that essentially with a quantum computer you could break all the cryptography that is currently on the internet. Factorization is a concrete example, but quite relevant because one of the current cryptographic systems that is most widely used on the Internet is based precisely on this mathematical problem. There are other math problems that are also currently used, but they can also be broken. Essentially, with a quantum computer, all of our current cryptography breaks down. And that’s where the idea of Quantum Safe Internet comes in: developing cryptographic methods that are robust.
Q. But is the current spiral reproduced where the development of new security technologies also favors the appearance of new forms of attack?
R. If our computers are more powerful, problems that were difficult will become easier to solve. Post-quantum cryptography looks for problems that a quantum computer may not be able to solve efficiently. Some algorithms have already been selected and will soon be made standard, but there is no guarantee.
P. In fact, some of the finalist algorithms have been broken with a classic computer or even with a laptop.
R. Indeed. It is a path that has certain advantages because, basically, it is to continue with the same type of infrastructure that we have now. But maybe, in a few years, someone will come up with an algorithm that is indeed very efficient and can retroactively access all the data from the past. It is a solution for short-term applications.
When you want to send information over an open communication channel that you do not control, that information can be copied. In quantum mechanics it is not possible
Q. Is there another way?
R. Another solution is based on quantum communications that can provide security against any computer. We can use this technology to achieve fully secure communications. When you want to send information over an open communications channel that you don’t control, that information can always be copied. In quantum mechanics it is not possible. If the information is encoded in elementary particles and in certain states it is not possible to copy the information and any attempt to do so will introduce detectable noise. Also, there is no guarantee that what you are trying to reproduce is an authentic copy of what was being transmitted. That security does not depend on computational capacity.
Q. And that’s where the University of Vigo comes in?
R. We have started an initiative to investigate in Spain and we have managed to create two groups of great international prestige at the Quantum Communication Center. One is led by Professor Hugo Zbinden, who comes from the University of Geneva and has been a pioneer in quantum communications since the 1990s. He has achieved some of the most relevant experimental results in the field at the moment and holds the record for the maximum transmission distance. Another group is that of Professor Vadim Makarov, from Quantum Hacking Lab, the leading expert on certification and hacking issues. Systems are secure and can be proven mathematically, but great care must be taken to build a secure system. Makarov is the leading international expert in finding vulnerabilities in these systems and solving them.
Q. Is Vigo going to be the capital of quantum security next year?
R. I would love to say it. Of course, I think that, at this moment, there are few initiatives or none in this specific field, quantum communications, that the talent we have at the University of Vigo has.
Q. Is the presence of experts of conflicting nationalities a security problem?
R. What we do is research that translates into scientific publications and the results will be public. To do research, I don’t see any kind of incompatibility. We are teams of different nationalities and some of us participate in some projects and not in others.
Q. Will there be quantum communications from space?
R. The European Space Agency has several programs in this sense with low orbit satellites and in Spain there is an initiative in which the University of Vigo participates with Hispasat to evaluate the possibilities of quantum communications links with very high orbit satellites.
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