Investigating quantum technologies
Dr Myrto Arapinis and Professor Elham Kashefi have been awarded $1.6M to explore quantum verification and validation issues.
The funding has been provided by the American Air Force Office of Scientific Research for their project, ‘Entrapping Machines.’
Professor Kashefi explains:
“Quantum technology has been recognised as a key global development, offering unparalleled computational speed and security as well as improved sensing and metrology. Many governments across the EU, North America and Asia have invested heavily in transferring the fundamental knowledge accomplished over the last three decades to the next era of business prosperity. The UK government alone, in an unprecedented initiative has recently invested £270M to explore the limits of what is possible in ICT using quantum enhanced methodologies.
“However this quantum approach has an acute verification and validation problem: On one hand since classical computations cannot scale up to the computational power of quantum mechanics, verifying the correctness of a quantum-mediated computation is challenging, on the other hand the underlying quantum structure resists classical certification analysis.
“The central objective of this project is an end to end investigation of the verification and validation of quantum technologies, from full scale quantum computers and simulators with devices of varying size and complexity down to realistic ‘quantum gadgets.’ This goal represents a key challenge in the roadmap of the transition from theory to practice for quantum computing technologies.”
Security and Privacy Research Group
The Security and Privacy group in the School of Informatics pans a range of topics including Quantum-enhanced Security, Cryptography and Distributed Ledger, Protocol and Program Verification, Socio-technical Security, Secure Future Networks, Device Security and Data Science Techniques.
Professor Kashefi’s group has set the benchmark, both theoretically and experimentally, for a hybrid network of quantum and classical devices to provide quantum-backed security guarantees. Pioneering contributions include the inventions of the fields of quantum verification and quantum cloud computing. New research directions, under collaboration with Dr Arapini's group, include post-quantum cryptography and application of multiparty quantum computation for electronic voting.