| Recent FY-2001
Accomplishments: | A digital signature
scheme is a method for one person to create documents whose origin can be
verified by one or more recipients. Much like a handwritten signature on a paper
document, a digital signature authenticates an electronic document and ensures
that it has not been tampered with. For instance, they can be used to sign legal
documents electronically. Many digital signature schemes using classical
cryptographic methods exist, but all rely upon unproven assumptions of
computational difficulty; that is, an adversary with unlimited computational
power can break any such scheme.
Professor Chuang and his collaborator have
recently invented a new method for creating digital signatures using quantum
systems. Unlike prior methods, this quantum digital signature is
absolutely secure. This scheme employs a public key, which is constructed from
quantum bits, and a private key, which is a set of classical bits. Copies of the
public key are distributed to a number of recipients in the first stage of the
protocol. To sign a message, the sender reveals a portion of the private keys;
since only she knows these, they authenticate her as the source of the message.
The signature cannot be forged, and multiple recipients will always agree on the
validity of a signature. |
| FY-2002 Plans: | The scope of this proposal is to lay the fundamental groundwork for
scalable, reliable, general-purpose quantum computers. The plan for this work
are divided into three major goals, each corresponding to efforts at a
collaborating institution.
UC Davis will bear primary responsibility for establishing a general quantum
computing architecture with practical error-correction overheads. We have the
specific goal of developing a scalable design for a solid-state quantum computer
capable of performing Shor's factorization algorithm on up to thousands of bits.
MIT will be the point of coordination among the three collaborating
institutions. MIT will bear primary responsibility for three major aspects of
this research: design of physical implementations of architectural components,
new quantum information protocols, and new fault-tolerance algorithms.
UC Berkeley will bear primary responsibility for applications of quantum
computing technology to the OceanStore system. In particular, Berkeley will
identify critical OceanStore operations, design a quantum co-processor
architecture, develop a security protocol for secure remote computation on
untrusted servers, and develop protocols for protecting data access patterns.
Our FY'02 specific plans focus on developing designs for quantum
memories, arithmetic units, and other natural architectural components. A
numerical simulation engine will be developed to evaluate and optimize the
performance of these subsystems.
| Technology
Transition: |
This project is working closely with industrial
partners in the research, including IBM (Yorktown and Almaden Research
Centers), and with Hewlett-Packard basic research. The team also has
regular communication, with laboratory industrial sponsors, including
Motorola, B-D, and the U.S. Postal Service, via twice-a-year meetings of
the Things That Think research consortium at the MIT Media Laboratory.
|
| Principal
Investigator: |
Isaac Chuang
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
20 Ames Street; MIT Media Lab
E15-435
Cambridge, MA 02139
617 253-0905
617 253-0053
fax
ichuang@media.mit.edu
Frederic Chong
Engineering Building II, Room 3031
U.C. Davis
Dept. of CS
Davis, CA 95616
530
754-9510
chong@cs.ucdavis.edu
John Kubiatowicz
Soda Hall, Computer Science Division
U.C.
Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94270
510
643-6817
kubitron@cs.berkeley.edu
Murray Whitehead
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
20
Ames Street; MIT Media Lab E15-435
Cambridge, MA 02139
617
253-0905
617 253-0053 fax
murrayw@media.mit.edu
Keith Odom
MIT E15-2xx
20 Ames
Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
617
253-1169
kodom@media.mit.edu
| |