‘Physicists in Action: Shaping the Future of Telecommunication’

Guest speaker Mehdi Namazi, Ph.D., post-doc at Yale in the Quantum Institute and co-founder and CEO of Qunnect (a company working on quantum communications), will present “Physicists in Action: Shaping the Future of Telecommunication.”

Since the birth of civilization, cybersecurity has been at the center of the focus of every government. On paper, it is a simple problem; as long as you have a secret key shared between two parties, you can securely communicate. In reality though, one way or another, you have to share the secret key and to make sure it really is secret! So far, specific mathematical methods have been commonly used to share a key over public channels. These methods typically rely on mathematical equations that are fast to create the cypher text but are extremely time-consuming for a hacker to decode, a famous example being factorizing a large number into two prime numbers, the base of almost all encryptions we use today.

As the computational power rises, it gets easier to hack these networks. For instance, a code that takes 500 years to be broken by a supercomputer today can be cracked in less than eight minutes on a future quantum processor. A very innovative solution is to replace the mathematical-based protocols with physical-based ones. In this talk, I will go briefly over the work physicists have done to address the key challenges in cybersecurity. Laws of quantum physics such as superposition, entanglement, and teleportation allow us to create the next generation of telecom technologies, globally known as quantum communication.