We have access to the information of everywhere almost instantaneously with countless kind of devices. We can download and transmit information from one place to another in seconds, something unimagined some decades ago. The problem today is not the amount of information that we can send/receive, neither the speed of the communication but the security of the data we want to communicate itself . Today we are more interested in protecting the information from malicious users, for instance a simply message to a friend or the password to our bank accounts are in continuous danger from cyberattacks. The unsecurity arise from the "networks" that we exploit to communicate, they are unsafe. While we are connected even to "protected" networks (wired or wireless) we are inside a system shared by other users which in principle can not only detect our presence but also access our devices and information without consent or trace.
This project will contribute to the very recent and highly growing field of quantum networks which is the pivotal step for the Quantum Internet with unbreakable security. Exploiting quantum phenomena we will exchange protected data through different laboratories of Sapienza University in order to simulate real cyberattacks from cryptographic perspective. Different mathematical and inference techniques will be applied in order to increase the amount of secure data to be generated and communicated. This networking approach with multipartite parties will be extended from two quantum sources to hopefully four of them.
This project will contribute to the very recent and highly growing field of quantum networks which is the pivotal step for the Quantum Internet with unbreakable security. Exploiting quantum phenomena we will exchange protected data through different laboratories of Sapienza University in order to simulate real cyberattacks from cryptographic perspective [1].
Different mathematical and inference techniques will be applied in order to increase the amount of secure data to be generated and communicated [2-4]. This networking approach with multipartite parties will be extended from two quantum sources to hopefully four of them. Surprisingly this technique can be harnessed to study complex configurations of the network, for instance, the simplest network is the one with two sources of quantum states and three distant parties concatenated linearly as depicted in Fig.1-b. In order to increase the level of security within the network under study, we need to approach more complex structures. Within this project we will also pursue the implementation of complex networks such as the star-shaped network (Fig.1-c) which has theoretically proved to provide higher level of security with respect to the concatenated networks, moreover the star-shaped structure could lead to unique protocols due to its particular configuration.
As a consequence of the complex configurations which can be easily adopted by the network, this project provides an insightful and powerful new framework to tackle quantum information problems [5-14] such as the one of cyberattacks.
References:
[1] K. Ried et al., Nature Physics 11, 414 (2015).
[2] C. M Lee and R. W. Spekkens, arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.03880 (2015).
[3] E. Wolfe, R. W Spekkens, and T. Fritz, arXiv:1609.00672 (2016).
[4] R. Chaves et al., Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence , 112¿ 121 (2014).
[5] T. Fritz, New Journal of Physics 14, 103001 (2012).
[6] J. Henson, R. Lal, and M. F. Pusey, New Journal of Physics 16, 113043 (2014).
[7] R. Chaves, C. Majenz, and D. Gross, Nature communications 6, 5766 (2015).
[8] F. Costa and S. Shrapnel, New J. Phys. 18, 063032 (2016).
[9] J.-M. A. Allen et al, Phys. Rev. X 7, 031021 (2017).
[10] C. J. Wood and R. W. Spekkens, New Journal of Physics 17, 033002 (2015).
[11] R. Chaves, R. Kueng, J. B. Brask, and D. Gross, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 140403 (2015).
[12] R. Chaves, D. Cavalcanti, and L. Aolita, Quantum 1, 23 (2017).
[13] R. Chaves, Polynomial bell inequalities, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 010402 (2016).
[14] G. Carvacho, R. Chaves and F. Sciarrino, EPL (Europhysics Letters) 125, 3 (2018).