Our daily communication involves a lot of data that we send through electronic devices.
This may involve things like
estonian ID-card, e-voting, web browsing, online banking and so on.
These protocols all can be subject to attacks
and quantum computers will make such attacks even more likely, even more easy to do.
And our job here is to make sure that future protocols withstand attacks by quantum computers
and that our communication infrastructure stays secure even in the next decade.
Quantum computers can help us solve a lot of tasks that are out of reach of today's computers.
Applications include chemistry, pharmaceuticals, also machine learning
and probably a lot of applications that we haven't even thought of yet.
It is only in cryptography and security that quantum computers pose somewhat of a threat.
Because they can attack today's cryptographic systems.
We can design systems that withstand quantum computers
and that will be more secure than what we have today.
Research on quantum technologies and also industrialization of quantum technologies
is extremely important if we want to stay competitive
and to stay at the poles of research and development in quantum technologies.
For Estonia to stay a competitive member of the research community in Europe
it would be very worthwhile to also think about investing in quantum technologies,
possibly built up infrastructures or hubs or centres for quantum technologies.
System security can be understood from different angles.
If we look around us in our everyday life
we will see different information systems and software systems which are using data and information.
But this data and information, it needs to be protected it needs to be confidential,
The near future challenge actually is
to understand on how we can design and develop the protected and secure system.
So the key challenge here stands of finding the different countermeasures
on how we can mitigate these vulnerabilities and also how we can reduce their impact.
At the University of Tartu we develop and test and evaluate different structures,
different schemes on how to build the information systems
which help us to deal with the personal information.
To be the lead in the system security
we need to develop the skills and capabilities to react quickly to the new appearing security risks
which may harm our systems.
In other words we need to expect the unexpected.