Imagine, for a moment, that the promise of powerful, super-fast quantum computers has materialized. Just like in the early days of regular computers, at first, there will only be a few of them, housed in special facilities. Users who want to harness their quantum capabilities will need to send data to a remote location, allow the computer to do its magic and send back the results.
Quantum physicists have shown that there’s a way to do this that’s absolutely secure— meaning the remote quantum computer will never understand the true data even while it is manipulating it. This is called “blind quantum computing.” Though other researchers have described the theory behind such a blind-quantum-computing protocol a few years ago, a group of scientists in Vienna were the first to demonstrate that it works. Their results were published last month in Science magazine.
Sruthi Pinnamaneni reports from Vienna.