THESE days it's easy to access ultra-powerful computers: just borrow one from Amazon, Microsoft or other firms offering cloud computing services. But analysing data with someone else's hardware makes it hard to keep it secret. Now it seems a dash of quantumness might be the best way to stay safe in the cloud.
In 2012, Stefanie Barz and her colleagues demonstrated ways of manipulating quantum states that can keep a server blind as it processes data. These kept cloud computing secure, but required a lot of back-and-forth traffic to eventually return the answer. So Barz, now at the University of Oxford, wondered if just a small amount of quantumness could provide a middle ground.
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