The Immortality Code

by Douglas E. Richards

  From my reading, it’s absolutely true that a full-fledged quantum computer could become the ultimate key to breaking encryption, and efforts to institute forms of encryption that are resistant to quantum computers aren’t going particularly well.

  I’ll leave this section with excerpts from a few articles I thought were interesting.

  WIRED, December 2019. “Revolt! Scientists Say They're Sick of Quantum Computing’s Hype.”

  EXCERPT: This spring, a mysterious figure by the name of Quantum Bullshit Detector strolled onto the Twitter scene. Posting anonymously, they began to comment on purported breakthroughs in quantum computing—claims that the technology will speed up artificial intelligence algorithms, manage financial risk at banks, and break all encryption.

  The provocations perplexed experts in the field. Because of the detector’s familiarity with jargon and the accounts it chose to follow, the person or persons behind the account seemed be part of the quantum community. Researchers were unaccustomed to such brazen trolling from someone in their own ranks.

  The anonymous account is a response to growing anxiety in the quantum community, as investment accelerates and hype balloons inflate. Governments in the US, UK, EU, and China have each promised more than $1 billion of investment in quantum computing and related technologies. Each country is hoping to become the first to harness the technology’s potential to help design better batteries or to break an adversary’s encryption system, for example. But these ambitions will likely take decades of work, and some researchers worry whether they can deliver on inflated expectations—or worse, that the technology might accidentally make the world a worse place.

  Most quantum researchers take a softer public stance, but they too have begun to voice their anxieties, particularly in response to a specific hyped announcement: Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration, in which the company’s researchers performed a largely useless mathematical problem on a quantum computer faster than a supercomputer. Since reports of this demonstration first leaked in September, many researchers have expressed concern that the word “supremacy” suggests quantum computers are now better than conventional ones, which is patently false. While Bermejo-Vega thinks Google’s demonstration does provide scientific value of the technology’s viability, she emphasizes their success was “narrow.” In addition, all quantum computers, including Google’s, perform inconsistently because they are prone to errors that researchers don’t know how to correct. “Google’s computer is mostly still a useless quantum computer for practical purposes,” Bermejo-Vega says.

  Forbes 2019, “Quantum Computing Poses An Existential Security Threat, But Not Today.”

  EXCERPT: Google’s announcement on October 23, 2019 that its scientists have achieved quantum supremacy was greeted with delight by physicists and computing engineers because the company had accomplished a feat that few thought possible this early in the development of quantum computing. “Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds,” the announcement said, “and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.”

  A reduction in computing time from 10,000 years to a little over 3 minutes is more than just a game changer—it redefines the whole concept of the game.

  But while it was wowing scientists, computer security experts became worried. Very worried. The reason is that difficulty in computing a decryption algorithm is at the heart of some of the most popular types of encryption. The encryption that’s used in your WiFi could be cracked in seconds. Likewise, the encryption that you use for everything from web browsing to banking transactions would no longer be protected.

  “From a cybersecurity perspective that scares me,” said Alissa Knight, senior analyst with Aite Group’s cybersecurity practice. “What this proves from my perspective is that we should no longer rely on cryptographic algorithms for security. We need to move into a way to defend against quantum computing attacks.”

  The National Security Agency is working on solutions to what the agency is calling the “Post Quantum world,” and is working to find means of protecting data against any current and future means of encryption cracking.

  Right now, the answer is still a work in progress. But this also means that you need to be planning for how you’re going to protect your organization in the post quantum world, even though we don’t know for sure when it will be here.

  Newsweek, December 2020. “As China Leads Quantum Computing Race, U.S. Spies Plan for a World with Fewer Secrets.”

  EXCERPT: Back in 1994, when quantum computers existed only as so much chalk on a blackboard, mathematician Peter Shor invented what may soon prove to be their killer app.

  Shor trained his efforts on a calculation called “factoring,” which ordinarily nobody but a mathematician would care about, except it just happens to be an Achilles’ heel of the internet. If someone were to invent a computer that could perform this operation quickly, messages that are currently hidden from hackers, terrorists, military adversaries, governments, and competitors would be as easy to read as a Stephen King novel. [Note, I’m pretty sure they meant to write “A Douglas E. Richards novel,” but accidentally got it wrong.]

  Dozens of engineering teams, from big companies like Google, IBM, and Amazon to universities and startups, are racing to build a full-scale working quantum computer. China is reportedly spending $10 billion on the effort, building a center devoted to quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

  China’s ambition in quantum technology has caused something of a Sputnik moment in the US, nearly as ominous as the Russian satellite in 1957 that kicked off the race to the moon. It wasn’t long ago that Chinese engineers were perceived as copycats. That is no longer the case. The long-term worry is that the US loses its technological edge.

  When quantum computers go live, what will happen to all our secrets? Will we wake up one day to find that China has been reading our mail? The NSA and other intelligence agencies are already preparing for a world where all their secrets are vulnerable. Shor’s algorithm, once a fanciful conjecture, is beginning to look like a threat. The question is, is the threat imminent?

  Encryption a quantum computer can’t break

  Quantum computing, encryption, and decryption are all highly complex fields that are way over my head. So it’s hard for me to make definitive statements on what the future might hold. Based on my research, though, I am confident that if a quantum computer is perfected, and if we persist in using the most widely used current encryption protocols, cybersecurity is in a world of hurt.

  There are several issues I mentioned in the novel that make transitioning to quantum safe encryption more of a challenge than first realized. These are all true, although possibly overstated for dramatic effect.

  There is also great excitement at the prospect of quantum cryptography, a theoretical system for encryption that cannot be breached, but as I noted in the novel, this might not be the panacea many people hope for.

  I’ve excerpted passages from a few articles below to shed further light on these subjects. First, an article about conventional encryption methods being worked on that researchers hope will be immune from quantum computers. And second, an article that describes some of the potential issues with quantum cryptography.

  MIT Technology Review, August 2020. “The quest for quantum-proof encryption just made a leap forward.”

  EXCERPT: Many of the things you do online every day are protected by encryption so that no one else can spy on it. Your online banking and messages to your friends are likely encrypted, for example—as are government secrets. But that protection is under threat from the development of quantum computers, which threaten to render modern encryption methods useless.

  While quantum machines are still a long way from being able to break modern encryption, NIST, The National Institute of Standards and Technology, launched a competition in 2016 to develop new standards for cryptography that
will be more quantum-proof. The race is long, with the winners set to be announced in 2022.

  . . . If so much time and effort is being put into heading off a security disaster, when will we see a quantum computer that can do all this?

  Last year Google famously boasted it had achieved “quantum supremacy” by finding a task a quantum computer could do that was essentially impossible for a classical computer. It was an important milestone, but it didn’t usher in a new era of quantum computing, and experts from industry and academia were quick to criticize it for a range of reasons.

  In reality, we’re likely a decade or more away from a quantum computer that can solve useful problems—which gives NIST time to make a decision so the transition to quantum-safe cryptography can begin.

  “It takes a long time to standardize and get cryptographic algorithms implemented and into products,” says NIST’s Moody. “It can take 10 to 20 years. We need this process done before a quantum computer is done so we’re ahead of the game.”

  Not everybody is convinced that the time will be well spent, however.

  “The next step is quantum computers solving a useful problem, which they haven’t done yet,” says Vadim Lyubashevsky, a cryptographer at IBM. “If that doesn’t happen for a long time, I think companies will forget the hype and implement the weakest thing that comes out of NIST until they are suddenly reminded of the problem in 30 years.”

  SPIE.Org News, November 2020. (Note: SPIE is the International Society for Optics and Photonics). “Hacking the Unhackable.”

  EXCERPT: Although quantum encryption can’t be tampered with, the devices built to generate and receive the photons, electrons, or clouds of ions used in quantum encryption are far from perfect. Researchers call this the implementation problem.

  “You can’t attack the quantum code, but you can attack the setup,” says cryptographer Michele Mosca of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

  Hackers—often other scientists—take advantage of these imperfections, using their wits to uncover loopholes that can compromise the security of quantum messaging. What’s more, some of these attacks can be accomplished without legitimate participants ever knowing about the breach.

  Vadim Makarov, a burly physicist with a flowing beard, is famous for finding such loopholes, known as side channels. Now director of the quantum hacking lab at the Russian Quantum Center in Moscow, Makarov found a relatively simple way to steal a quantum key without a trace a decade ago.

  . . . In another mode of attack, physicist Hoi-Kwong Lo of the University of Toronto and his colleagues focused on exploiting the timing involved in how some quantum encryption systems encode messages, introducing errors that prevent the parties from knowing the code has been stolen.

  “There are a lot of tricks to the trade,” says Mosca.

  In patching these loopholes, new, unexpected ones may arise, notes physicist Dirk Englund, head of the quantum photonics laboratory at MIT. That’s because QKD typically relies on simple mathematical models to describe the operation of the devices involved in the encryption. If the actual devices behave differently than the models, it could leave real-life QKDs vulnerable to hackers, noted Victor Zapatero and Marcus Curty of the University of Vigo in Spain in a recent Nature article.

  Tech Ops and the great US/China tech war

  ET Ops and Tech Ops are not real organizations—as far as I know. In the novel, I write that Tech Ops was born after the head of American Black Ops read a short book written by a man named Gordon Chang, entitled The Great U.S.—China Tech War. While Tech Ops is fictional, this book is not.

  If you Google “The US China tech war,” you’ll find plenty of additional reading material. I’ll provide a few excerpts below. To begin with, I’ll share the headline from an article in the Wall Street Journal (January 2021). “The U.S./China Tech War Won’t End Under Biden. A softer touch is likely, but Democrats and Republicans share concerns about the threat to core American industries and China’s techno-authoritarian ambitions.”

  Here are a few more excerpts.

  National Defense, December 2020, “U.S. Already 0-1 in Tech War with China.”

  EXCERPT: Chinese President Xi Jinping told the United Nations General Assembly recently that his nation has “no intention to fight either a cold war or a hot one with any country.”

  That may be. But what is really happening is a “technology war.” There is little awareness among the American public about this undeclared war, but it’s well understood in Beijing. The term “Tech War” may one day describe the age we are living in as “the Cold War” did after World War II.

  The United States lost a major battle that it didn’t even realize it was fighting when China over the past decades established monopolies on several critical rare earth elements and a few other strategic minerals—a topic that this magazine has touched upon several times over the years.

  This will prove to be a major strategic defeat as these elements are the building blocks for many of this century’s emerging technologies. Smartphones—and even some U.S. weapon systems—don’t work without them.

  Then there is the battle for 5G dominance.

  “Despite the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, the United States—which paced the world in developing and deploying so many other transformative technologies—is falling behind in the 5G race, while China is sprinting ahead,” says a report, America’s 5G Moment of Truth, released by The New Center think tank.

  The Tech War has several battlefronts other than 5G. Among them are: aviation, space technology, biotech, quantum sciences, robotics, military technology, and artificial intelligence.

  CMC Markets, March 2020. “US-China Tech War: Who Will Dominate Future Tech?”

  EXCERPT: There is a technology competition taking place behind the ongoing US-China trade war, and the fight to gain this tech supremacy will have a far-reaching impact, along with huge commercial and national security advantages.

  The so-called fourth industrial revolution—represented by 5G communications, artificial intelligence and quantum computing—is emerging among the world’s top technology giants, most of which are based in the US and China.

  I’ll end this section by writing a few words about the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese government has become more and more oppressive to its people in recent years, and this trend shows no signs of abating. If you have further interest in this topic, a quick internet search will provide considerable reading material. I recommend reading a 2016 article in Time Magazine entitled, “Five Ways China Has Become More Repressive Under President Xi Jinping,” which calls China “The world’s worst jailer of the press.”

  And that’s only the beginning. The Chinese government exerts a draconian online censorship regime, as well as ideological control over education and mass media. They restrict religious freedom and persecute human rights activists. Women and girls in China confront sexual abuse and harassment, employment discrimination, and domestic violence. China is also imprisoning over one million Muslims in what they officially call an effort to prevent terrorism, extremism, and separatism.

  Graphene, carbyne, and octa-nitro-cubane

  Everything written in The Immortality Code about these three materials is accurate. If you’re interested in learning more, a simple Google search will produce plenty of reading material. Some of the articles I read include:

  New Yorker Magazine, 2014. “Material Question: Graphene may be the most remarkable substance every discovered. But what’s it for?”

  ExtremeTech.com, 2013. “Carbyne: A new form of carbon that’s stronger than graphene.

  Nano Magazine, 2019. “Why are there challenges with graphene manufacturing?”

  Like graphene and carbyne, octa-nitro-cubane is also a form of carbon, in this case formed into a cube. I’ve used this wonder material in previous novels, and it is indeed thought to be the most powerful non-nuclear explosive known, and nearly impossible to produce, requiring forty chemical steps to synthesize even a tin
y amount. If you do Google octa-nitro-cubane, be aware that the word doesn’t really have any hyphens. I took the liberty of adding these in for ease of reading.

  The psychopaths among us

  As with many elements of this novel, I have touched upon psychopathy in previous works, mostly because psychopaths make great villains, and because I’m fascinated by this condition. Almost a decade ago I made an in-depth study of what makes psychopaths tick, and spent almost a year appearing on dozens of radio programs to discuss this condition.

  I was fascinated when I first learned that the brains of psychopaths differ from those of non-psychopaths, and also that psychopaths represent one percent of the population. They are predators—cold-blooded, callous, and cool under pressure—and we are prey. And while their emotions are shallow and superficial, they can be unbelievably charming and charismatic.

  They can be accountants, lawyers, and politicians. They are the unscrupulous coworker who plays the boss like a fiddle, takes credit for your work, and stabs you in the back with a smile. Or the charmer who moves in with a girlfriend, sucks her dry financially and emotionally, and then spits her out and moves on without a care in the world.

  For anyone interested in the topic, I highly recommend reading a lay book by Robert Hare, the guru of the field, entitled, “Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us.”

  Smart contact lenses, telepathy, and subvocal communication

  I’ve used all of these concepts multiple times now because I find their potential breathtaking. This is the last section of the author notes. Those of you who have read my previous novels may want to stop reading, or skip ahead to my author bio if you have interest, as you’re likely to have already read the information presented below.