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Mathematician Breaks Down How to Defend Against Quantum Computing Attacks


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The encryption codes that safeguard Internet data today won't be secure forever.

Nathan Hamlin, director of the Math Learning Center at Washington State University, has created software that could protect encrypted code from hackers armed with quantum computers.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A Washington State University (WSU) mathematician has created and released software that could protect encrypted code from hackers armed with next-generation quantum computers.

Quantum computers theoretically provide processing power that is millions of times faster than silicon-based computers, which could enable future hackers to decrypt any Internet communication sent with modern encryption techniques.

Nathan Hamlin, director of the WSU Math Learning Center, created the Generalized Knapsack Code, which disguises data with number strings more complex than the standard binary and base 10 sequences.

"The Generalized Knapsack Code expands upon the binary representations today's computers use to operate by using a variety of representations other than 0s and 1," Hamlin says. "This lets it block a greater array of cyberattacks, including those using basis reduction, one of the decoding methods used to break the original knapsack code."

From WSU News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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