Human-Centered Cybersecurity: Examining Ethical and Societal Considerations of Quantum Technologies

In the past decade, quantum technologies have made remarkable progress. Quantum technologies are able to collect and utilize quantum phenomena to facilitate the accomplishment of tasks deemed infeasible by conventional means. Developments of quantum computers and cryptographic protocols have drawn extensive attention of both academia and industry. On one hand, quantum computation facilitates the rapid progress of various tasks/computing. The prime examples are the algorithms for simulating quantum systems, quantum cryptography, and solving the integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems through an algorithm. These advances have important and far-reaching discoveries: the first physical quantum computer was introduced in 2011; quantum cryptography has been used in widely-deployed devices; the first quantum-resistant algorithms were standardized in 2017. Vendors have recently launched their cloud-accessible quantum computers. This is expected to stimulate the rapid development of the quantum industry and its derivative technologies. However, the advantage in the rise of quantum technologies comes concomitant with various new challenges as well. Intractable problems overcome by the conventional methods become vulnerable to their quantum counterparts. New vulnerabilities have been spotted prior to the advent of quantum computers – more sophisticated attacks are underway, and organizations may indeed be breached already but remain unaware of. Furthermore, almost all advanced security technologies rely on the tacit assumption that the computational task required by the adversary is computationally harder than the security-related one. Therefore, the backgrounds of cyber security and quantum technologies call for a thorough rethinking of their avoidances. Under such circumstance, the scientific community should openly discuss the ethical and societal considerations of quantum technologies – what responsible researchers and developers should do to protect the world from their prospective vulnerabilities and harms. This comprehensive survey intends to explore a discussion of these emerging issues.