Blog: Fighting Tomorrow's Hackers

Fighting Tomorrow's Hackers
American Friends of Tel Aviv University (02/05/09)

The development of quantum computing threatens to expose the security of digital information as the technology could be used to bypass the current cryptographic systems used by businesses and banks. "We need to develop a new encryption system now, before our current systems... become instantly obsolete with the advent of the first quantum computer," says Oded Regev, a professor at Tel Aviv University's Blavantnik School of Computer Science. Regev has proposed a secure and efficient system that is backed by a mathematical proof of security and believed to be the first solution safe from quantum computers. Regev combined ideas from quantum computation with research from other leaders in the field to create a system that is efficient enough for real-world applications. Regev first presented his work at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, and it will appear in the Journal of the ACM. The work also will become the foundation for other cryptographic systems projects at the Stanford Research Institute, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev's proposed system could have a variety of real-world applications, including banking transactions, online auctions, and digital signatures.

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