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Close the Back Door
Cyber Security in a Quantum World
Prabhakar fell asleep watching online videos not long after his wife succumbed to slumber. He'd had a busy day creating digital art. He'd uploaded a new book cover to his cloud service that evening and would wake up to feedback from his client in America, a famous author who had taken a liking to Prabhakar's art. This cover could make his career. A million people seeing his art… The possibilities astonished him.
As he slept, a quantum supercomputer residing in a server cluster in Mumbai ran without tiring. Nicknamed the Eigenweasels, it solved complex quadratic equations using thermal annealing. But Prabhakar didn't care. All he cared was that it kept his art safe.
The Eigenweasels launched cyber attack after cyber attack against… well, themselves. They sought back doors in the world's infrastructure, and when they found it, closed it.
Prabhakar's cloud service had one such vulnerability. The 'friendly fire' exposed the weakness, but did not take advantage of it. Instead, the Eigenweasels alerted network administrators to the risk. Within minutes, the 'back door' was not just closed, but bricked over.
The author was quite pleased by Prabhakar's work and had very little feedback. Artist and author each had a peaceful digital interchange and never noticed the Eigenweasels guarding their backs.