VentureBeat: How far back did people predict this would happen, that you would be able to do this?
Earl: The idea of entangled photons, with these particles being in two places at the same time, goes pretty far back, all the way to Einstein. He called it “spooky action at a distance,” this idea that you could have a connection between these particles or that they could go in different directions at the same time. He actually didn’t believe it. He wrote a big paper saying that there must be something wrong with our physics because it was predicting this, and it couldn’t possibly be right.
Over time — it’s taken 80 years — we’ve experimentally proven that this is what’s happening. That’s become easier and easier to do, producing these photons, over the last couple of decades. With Qubitekk’s plug-and-play system, now it’s really in everybody’s hands, getting these entangled photons and using them. That’s the first step to seeing quantum-enabled products. We’re at an exciting threshold. It’s becoming easier to apply and use these weird quantum particles.
VentureBeat: What would you say to Einstein now?
Earl: I think even he knew it was right, on his deathbed. It just bothered him a lot. One thing that would probably make him feel better is that when people used to talk about entangled photons and all these really weird properties of quantum particles, it was made a lot worse by the fact that you couldn’t see them or play with them or manipulate them. That’s different now. We have a series of YouTube videos we’re going to be releasing, one each month, that show us using these entangled photons and doing a number of experiments. You can get an intuition about how they react. It’s weird physics, but it’s not magic. You can start to build up an understanding of how this physics works and these exciting new technologies. It all seems a lot more real when you can experiment with these particles and get a feel for them.
I always joke, these particles are like unicorns. People talk about them, but nobody’s ever seen one. That’s changing. Everybody’s going to be able to see them and get a feel for what you can do with them.
VentureBeat: Why was security a good application?
Earl: The reality is that we have a lot of security problems right now that are low-hanging fruit, that need to be solved, related to mundane situations. A lot of simple housecleaning needs to occur on the security side. These are problems we can solve. I’m not sure anybody’s too concerned about them. It just requires some vigilance.
However, when you look five or 10 years into the future and you look at quantum computers coming on the scene, that is a lot more concerning. A quantum computer breaks something called public-key cryptography. All of our secure communications over the Internet are based on that. At its core, it’s about mathematical complexity. There are these really hard problems that computers have trouble doing today, and they allow our Internet to establish secrecy. When a quantum computer shows up, those hard problems aren’t hard anymore. That public key cryptography breaks down.
This could essentially end the information age, if we don’t have an alternative to public-key cryptography in a quantum-computing world. We need a security solution that’s ready for that. Anyway, the world could always benefit from better security. That’s why we took the time and partnered with Oak Ridge to build this near-term quantum-cryptography system that has immediate applications. The system we’re building for DOE isn’t going to secure the Internet, but it’s the first step towards that. We wanted to highlight that near term application of a quantum-improved security solution.
VentureBeat: What is it about quantum computing that can make us more secure?
Earl: Although all of this is based on quantum mechanics and these particles I was just describing, there are two separate technologies being developed here. One is a quantum-cryptography system that leverages quantum mechanics to secure communications. Then, we have the quantum computer, which can do all kinds of cool stuff for medicine or movies or video games or materials discovery but can also break security like I was talking about. The quantum computer is really a separate technology, although it’s based on the same fundamental principles.
When you think about quantum cryptography and how that secures communications, maybe the easiest way to think about it is that whenever you secure communications. It’s really all based on random numbers. A bunch of ones and zeroes that occur at random. For two people to communicate, they need to share that random number set. It could be 10001. Whatever it is, it’s fine, so long as both parties share it.
Sharing it is the hard part. If you and I wanted to have a secure conversation, I could jump on a plane and go see you and give you a list of these random ones and zeroes. Then, I could keep another list, fly back to my office, and when we talked we could encrypt our messages using this shared number list. However, that’s very inefficient. The Internet doesn’t want to do it that way. It just wants me to log in and immediately establish a list between you and I. To do that, we use complex mathematical algorithms to generate pseudo-random lists. Unfortunately, if you can break those algorithms or formulas, that makes it impossible to be secure, and that’s what a quantum computer can do.
What quantum cryptography does is use physics to establish that randomness. It takes one of the photons from an entangled photon pair and sends it to you. I’ll keep the other one. We make a measurement on these entangled photons and get some value that we both share. It’ll just be random, but we’ll share it, and that’ll be great for sending our protected message.
Here’s the important part. If anyone tries to intercept that photon and measure it and send you another one to cover their tracks, they can’t do that. The laws of quantum mechanics prevent it. It would immediately be detectable by me, the guy with the other photon, if these had been tampered with, and I wouldn’t send the secure message. It’s that tamper-proof property of the entangled photons that allows us to establish 100-percent secure communication links.
The key is that it relies on physics. It doesn’t rely on some complex mathematical formula that could be broken by a supercomputer. It doesn’t rely on a secret key. It just relies on physics. I need to be able to send you this particle and keep the other one. That’s all. At Qubitekk we have a little different spin on this that allows us to do it over wireless channels, but fundamentally, that’s the crux of it.
VentureBeat: How is your own progress here going toward getting products out?
Earl: We’re making steady progress on our end from a product development standpoint. We were fortunate to have some seed-round investment that’s propelled the technology. These new grants from the DOE, as well as one from the California Energy Commission, have helped move this technology forward as well. Ultimately, we’d like to do a series A raise so that we can accelerate.
One of the challenges we’re having is that this is a very new technology. A lot of people are a little gun-shy about whether or not the engineering can be done to bring it to fruition. Those questions are quickly evaporating, though, as we start to move product out there and demonstrate that this isn’t magic. It isn’t 23rd-century technology. It’s here and now, and if you raise enough money, you can get those products here sooner rather than later.
When we look at building a quantum computer, for example, a lot of work goes into it, but it’s just engineering. We can take the technology we’ve built to date and leverage it moving forward. We can shrink all these devices down and end up with a quantum computer within a couple of years that blows open the doors of what’s possible.