In 1994, as Professor Peter Shor PhD ’85 tells it, internal seminars at AT&T Bell Labs were lively affairs. The audience of physicists was an active and inquisitive bunch, often pelting speakers with questions throughout their talks. Shor, who worked at Bell Labs at the time, remembers several occasions when a speaker couldn’t get past their third slide, as they attempted to address a rapid line of questioning before their time was up. That year, when Shor took his turn to present an algorithm he had recently worked out, the physicists paid keen attention to Shor’s entire talk — and then s ..read more

Academic digital credentials — the cryptographically verifiable assertion that an individual holds a degree, certificate, or other credential — have been available for the better part of a decade. Yet despite the potential value of these data-rich, transportable credentials to graduates, employers, and academic institutions, digital credentials have by no means become the standard in presenting or verifying skills and qualifications. A new report from the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC), housed at MIT Open Learning, explores this gap between the promise of digital credentials and their wi ..read more

Peter Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, has been named a recipient of the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He shares the $3 million prize with three others for “foundational work in the field of quantum information”: David Deutsch at the University of Oxford, Charles Bennett at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard of the University of Montreal. In announcing the award, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation highlighted Shor’s contributions to the quantum information field, including the eponymous Shor’s algorithm for factoring extremely large numbers, and for an a ..read more

Renowned mathematician and quantum computing pioneer Peter W. Shor PhD ’85 has been named the recipient of MIT’s 2022-2023 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the Institute faculty can bestow upon one of its members each academic year. The Killian Award citation credits Shor, who is the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics, with having made “seminal contributions that have forever shaped the foundations of quantum computing. Indeed, quantum computing exists today, in practice, because of Peter Shor.” “Moreover,” the citation continues, “Professor Shor’s work dem ..read more

Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people’s Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day. Recent research, however, has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal about the sources of supposedly anonymous communications by monitoring data traffic through just a few well-chosen nodes in an anonymity network. At the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, a team of MIT researchers present ..read more

One of the many promising applications of quantum mechanics in the information sciences is quantum key distribution (QKD), in which the counterintuitive behavior of quantum particles guarantees that no one can eavesdrop on a private exchange of data without detection. As its name implies, QKD is intended for the distribution of cryptographic keys that can be used for ordinary, nonquantum cryptography. That’s because it requires the transmission of a huge number of bits for each one that’s successfully received. That kind of inefficiency is tolerable for key distribution, but not for general-p ..read more

Every Friday afternoon for several years in the 1970s, a group of underemployed quantum physicists met at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, in Northern California, to talk about a subject so peculiar it was rarely discussed in mainstream science: entanglement. Did subatomic particles influence each other from a distance? What were the implications? Many of these scientists, who dubbed themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” were fascinated by the paranormal and thought quantum physics might reveal “the possibility of psycho-kinetic and telepathic effects,” as one put it. Some of the physicists ..read more

Millions of Americans have implantable medical devices, from pacemakers and defibrillators to brain stimulators and drug pumps; worldwide, 300,000 more people receive them every year. Most such devices have wireless connections, so that doctors can monitor patients' vital signs or revise treatment programs. But recent research has shown that this leaves the devices vulnerable to attack: In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could kill a victim by instructing an implantable device to deliver lethal doses of medication or electricity. At the Association for Computing Machinery's upcoming Sigc ..read more

Information theory — the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression — also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have depended on a common assumption. Unfortunately, as a group of researchers at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth demonstrated in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Information Theory (view PDF), that assumption is false. In a follow-up paper being presented this ..read more

Homomorphic encryption is one of the most exciting new research topics in cryptography, which promises to make cloud computing perfectly secure. With it, a Web user would send encrypted data to a server in the cloud, which would process it without decrypting it and send back a still-encrypted result. Sometimes, however, the server needs to know something about the data it’s handling. Otherwise, some computational tasks become prohibitively time consuming — if not outright impossible. Suppose, for instance, that the task you’ve outsourced to the cloud is to search a huge encrypted database fo ..read more