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Quantum technologies are expected to transform defence and security through advances in sensing, secure communications, navigation, computing, and decision support. The Quantum Defence Innovation Secure Hub (DISH) will provide a secure environment where government, industry, academia, and innovators can collaborate to rapidly develop, test, validate, and transition these technologies into operational capabilities for the Canadian Armed Forces. The hub will strengthen Canada’s technological advantage, improve operational effectiveness, and reduce vulnerabilities in contested environments, including threats such as GPS spoofing.
A University of Calgary-led consortium will receive $20.3 million over two years to establish and operate the Quantum DISH in Calgary. Bringing together organizations from Canada’s quantum, defence, and innovation sectors, the consortium will help accelerate the transition of promising Canadian quantum technologies from research into mission-ready capabilities that support Canada’s defence and security priorities.
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“Quantum will shape the next generation of defence capabilities, and Canada must be prepared to lead—not follow,” says David J. McGuinty, Canadian Minister of National Defence.
“Through the Quantum Defence Innovation Secure Hub, we’re bringing together Canadian researchers, innovators, industry, and government to accelerate Made-in-Canada quantum technologies into mission-ready capabilities that strengthen the operational advantage of the Canadian Armed Forces while growing Canada’s sovereign defence industrial base.”
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Regular non-ai brute forcing can do billions of guesses per second on a single machine. But that’s still not helpful because your estimate of “millions of possibilities” is off by several orders of magnitude. For a 128 bit key, there are 2^128 (~ 3.4 x 10^38, or 340 billion billion billion billion) possible keys. You’re not brute forcing that.
Additionally, modern crypto is not susceptible to known plaintext attacks (implied by your “if it’s a message, not that hard…” statement.) It doesn’t help you guess the answer if you know whether the encrypted message you’re attacking is a password or an English phrase.
AI IS brute forcing. AI uses graphic processors, that are designed to handle an entire screen full of pixels at one go. There is really nothing magical about them, except the new moniker AI. They have been around for decades. What is new is the applications they are being applied to.
Actually, modern crypto is now completely dependent on these (ASIC) processors to come up with the encryption codes in the first place, so if ASCI can create the codes, ASCI can decrypt them. The codes that experts previously thought would take years of computer time to decode, ASCI processors are doing it in hours. The token behind crypto currency that formerly took weeks of computing time to mine, can now be generated in hours if not minutes by an ASCI processor server farm. That means these crypto tokens now cost a fraction of what they did just a year ago. Yes that means the bottom will soon fall out of the crypto market.
None of that is correct.
A Bit Coin is mined every ten minutes. When the rate of new demand for bitcoin falls below the time (cost) to mine a new one, the price drops. A bitcoin miner will have to recover costs, and will have to sell for whatever they can get. Simple supply and demand economics. The cost of a bitcoin has dropped, and is hovering around the price in 2024. There is still a premium between the cost to produce a bitcoin and the cost of a bitcoin, but it is shrinking. The one thing that is keeping the price up is that now only major players can afford the hardware and energy to mine them economically, the casual player has been locked out. Moore’s Law states that it will not be long before Bitcoin mining once again becomes possible for the casual miner. That point is not long in coming. When that happens, the supply will far outstrip the demand. The market becomes flooded and uncontrolled.
AI is brute force computing. It does the same thing, repeatedly, over and over, but not in typical computations. It’s brute force strength is in pattern recognition. AI does not have to compute every combination, it just has to recognize the pattern.
At the turn of the century, 64 bit codes were common. In the 1980’s, they were considered unbreakable. It is those codes that ASIC processors and GPU’s can break with impunity. With Moore’s law, definitely within twenty years 128 bit encryption will also fall. In point of fact, the hardware in the AI and ASIC server farms of today will be obsolete in five years.
If you know what pattern you are looking for (you know the text) finding the encryption key is just pattern recognition. You don’t need to compute the encryption code, you just need to match it. As I stated, generating the pattern is not the problem, determining which pattern is the correct one is the conundrum. A GPU has no problem in recognizing and generating the pattern. That is why computer games have become so blazingly fast. But unless you know the password, you have nothing to compare the pattern to. And if you know the password, you do not need to find it. Thus recognizing text is not the problem but recognizing an unknown password is. That is, if you know what you are looking for, AI can find it fast.