'Blind' Quantum Computing Proposed For the Cloud 89
judgecorp writes "Researchers at Vienna's Quantum Science and Technology Center have proposed that 'blind' quantum computing could be carried out securely in the cloud. When (if?) quantum computers are developed, they will be very fast, but not everyone will have them. Blind quantum computing will be useful, because it shows that users can encode 'qubits' and send them to a shared quantum computer to be worked on — without the quantum computer having any knowledge of what the data is (abstract). The data also cannot be decoded form the qubit while it is in transit. It's good to know that quantum computers will be secure when they exist. At the moment, of course, they are even more secure, by virtue of their non-existence."
quantum hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Quantum computing is just a rather basic branch of computer science which seems to be winning all the hype in the world at the moment because there's not much sexy in terms of hard non-biological research with a practical slant.
I'm not quite sure how the output remains unknown to the computer. I know most cloud services either haven't or won't last long enough to give you all the output you were expecting to get for free/absurdly low cost, but I'd be very impressed with a computing system which is able to deliver you something without knowing it's delivered it.
Of course, there are various computations which can be performed partly by a separate processor without the initial input and final output being known by that separate processor, but there's nothing quantum-y about that.