ALIBABA’S KEY TO CRYPTOSECURITY IS ITS OWN QUANTUM PLATFORM
+ The quantum technology Alibaba has developed is now being put to the test for quantum encryption for financial transactions among its cloud users, including Ant Financial and Alipay. According to Leilei Huang, an infrastructure engineer and colleagues at Oxford, this quantum security work has been in production for over a year.
“Our platform demonstrates quantum random number services with sufficient and adaptive generation speeds, reasonably low costs, controllable risks, high stability, and simple maintenance.”
+ At the heart of the work, which is running on one of Alibaba’s quantum simulators, is random number generation. That might sound like a simple function but it is the key to secure financial transactions. Compared to past approaches, quantum random number generation has been proven the most secure cryptographic approach but it takes multiple methods to arrive at a robust result to reduce predictability of the generated set, involving rather sci-fit sounding mechanisms like detecting the path of a single-photon after a beam splitter, finding the arrival time of a weak coherent state, or counting photos or vacuum fluctuations of an optical field.
+ According to Alibaba engineers, depending on specific circumstances, different strategies can be applied to meet the requirements of different levels of security and speeds. For example, financial services such as Alipay require the utmost security and all possible loopholes in the cryptosystem must be closed. For this purpose, random numbers from various quantum devices are taken and processed. “As a result, the highest speed is limited by the slowest QRNG at a rate of 16 Mbps. If end-users have concerns with some specific entropy sources or if any of the hardware breaks down, they can always choose an arbitrary combination of these quantum random number generators.”
+ “Pseudo-random numbers generated by deterministic algorithms will inevitably be predictable and reproducible. The quality of pseudo-random numbers is related to the complexity of the algorithm. With the increasing computing power, the security guaranteed by the complexity of the algorithm is seriously threatened. In contrast, QRNGs with intrinsic unpredictability can be used to greatly enhance the security of cryptosystems,” they explain.
Source: THE NEXT PLATFORM. Nicole Hemsworth, ALIBABA’S KEY TO CRYPTOSECURITY IS ITS OWN QUANTUM PLATFORM…
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