[AG-TECH] Wednesday Seminar at UKy (Jan 30th)

[Vikram Gazula]

The following lecture on the exciting new field of quantum computing will
be broadcast on the Access Grid on Wednesday.. watch this space for more
seminars from UKy every Wedneday!


Wednesday, January 30
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm Eastern
Access Grid Admin, sysadmin at ccs.uky.edu
Venue: Talus
CCS Wednesday Seminar
URL: http://www.ccs.uky.edu/ccs/profiles/Spring02/wed/wed.htm

Dr. David Harmin of the University of Kentucky Department of Physics will
be talking about: \"Using Qubits to Qurack the Uncrackable\".

Abstract: http://www.ccs.uky.edu/ccs/profiles/Spring02/wed/Jan30.html

"Using Qubits to Qurack the Uncrackable"
Dr. David Harmin
UK Department of Physics
The dream of Quantum Computing as an intrinsically efficient, massively
parallel approach to bit manipulations has provoked widespread interest
for its promise of solving otherwise intractable computational problems.
This vision has run headlong into another, much older dream -- that of
Uncrackable Codes. The last twenty years has witnessed the discovery of
the RSA encryption scheme (among others), which is, in practice, a code
that not only allows one to distribute encoding keys publicly but which
could not be broken even if every computer in the Galaxy were devoted to
the task for many ages of the Universe. Or so one hoped. An algorithm
invented by Peter Shor to factor large numbers using a hypothetical
quantum computer would allow one to decode these indecipherable ciphers
after all by efficiently factoring large numbers. We will review the
history of cryptology, what RSA encryption is and why it is practical (so
far), how a quantum computer might function, and how it could be used to
crack RSA-encrypted messages.