Security News > 2020 > August > The Promise and Threat of Quantum Computing

We talked to Professor Frank Wailhelm-Mauch, a theoretical physicist working on quantum computing and head of the quantum solid state research group at Saarland University.

The potential of quantum computing can be seen by comparing it to classical computing.

"The trick is now to find a quantum algorithm that on the one hand uses this massive parallelism and that on the other hand gives you the right answer with an acceptable probability. Ideally, that probability should be certainty, but 50% is also fine - just run it a couple of times. This is the art of writing quantum algorithms."

In classical computer hardware, he said, "This possibility is mind-bogglingly low. If you are running a classical computer, only in the most extreme security considerations would you even think about potential hardware failure because software failure will always occur first. For quantum computers it is very different, first of all because it is very experimental hardware, but also because there are intrinsic aspects of the fragility of quantum mechanics - this opens a lot of routes for error and is why the error rate of quantum operations is very high."

The quantum threat comes from the increase in computing power together with the existence of an algorithm that can harness that power to solve the problem: both parts are necessary.

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